It is impossible to understand the content of the "Voynich manuscript", one of the most mysterious manuscripts in the world, which still cannot be deciphered, despite a number of statements from different people that they managed to read the text, believes the head of the department at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Orlov, whose group at one time established that this manuscript was written in several languages.
Earlier, the media reported that the British linguist from the University of Bristol Gerard Cheshire said that he had partially read the "Voynich manuscript". Cheshire concludes that the manuscript is an abridged summary of information on the properties of herbs and healing baths, as well as astrological information. In his opinion, the authors of the manuscript are Dominican nuns who compiled it for Queen Maria of Castile of Aragon around the middle of the 15th century.
The manuscript bears the name of the antiquarian Wilfred Voynich, the husband of the writer Ethel Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. In 1961, a second-hand bookseller bought the manuscript from the heiress Ethel Voynich for $ 24.5 thousand and in 1969 donated it to the Yale University Rare Book Library, where it is kept today. The manuscript was intensively studied by amateurs of cryptography and professionals of cryptanalysis, but even part of the manuscript could not be deciphered.
“At this stage, it - the message, and not the work itself in question - is one of many messages of the same kind, which claimed that the manuscript had been deciphered. In fact, the semantic decoding of speech is not yet discussed, the author set forth a hypothesis about the language of individual fragments of the text, Orlov said.
Problems with "reading" the manuscript
He also highlighted the main problems in the analysis of this type of manuscript.
“It should be noted that the author of the transcription himself pointed out that he could not unambiguously interpret some of the symbols (however, there are not very many of them), and then he replaced them with a certain letter. Also, the authors of other transcriptions have their own subjective reading of the manuscript. There is no question of objective reading, because the alphabet of the corresponding language has not been found,”he added.
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Secondly, if the alphabet is not known, then the only thing that can be determined is the most likely language of the text, Orlov said.
“Since I am not a graphologist, I don’t presume to argue with which signs are the same and which are different. At the same time, I would like to note that in Russian it is very difficult to distinguish by writing (by hand) the fused letters “i”, “l”, “sh”, “n”, “m”, one from another. You can confuse "a", "o" and "e", the letters "p", "l", "i", "t" and so on. If you do not know the words that should have been in the semantic context, then a completely Russian text is sometimes an intricate cipher, "Orlov said.
In addition, it is impossible to exclude misprints, as well as simply the illiteracy of the person who wrote the source text, the source said. “Therefore, to me personally, as a mathematician, all this fuss around the semantic decoding of the manuscript seems to be a struggle of fermatists. Fermatists are such crazy pseudo-mathematicians who for hundreds of years have been trying to prove the Great Fermat's theorem using elementary methods on one notebook page, Orlov added.
Manuscript as a language mixture
According to Orlov, a linguistically interesting task is the development of statistical methods that make it possible to say with a certain degree of probability that a text is written in a natural language, even if the language itself is not known. “It is not very sensible to set other tasks in relation to texts in unknown languages,” the scientist said.
According to him, work is not being carried out directly on the manuscript at the Institute of Applied Mathematics. "We are not interested in its content … The methods developed in its analysis are used by us in other areas of mathematical linguistics, in particular for the analysis of various problems from the field of psychology and sociology," the source said.
The Voynich manuscript itself can be viewed here.
