Two Canadian cryptanalysts may have deciphered a medieval manuscript known as the Voynich manuscript, which has opposed attempts to understand it for centuries.
The manuscript was created in Central Europe in the 15th century and contains 246 parchment sheets.
The text from the characters of a peculiar alphabet is placed in short paragraphs with writing from left to right and interspersed with detailed color drawings. There are images of castles, dragons, plants, planets, nudes, astronomical symbols.
The manuscript has been in the Yale University Rare Book Collection since 1969. It is named after the Polish antiquarian Wilfred Voynich, who acquired the manuscript in Italy in 1912.
Based on the illustrations, it is assumed that the manuscript contains six parts on botany, astronomy, biology, cosmology, pharmaceuticals and culinary.
What's new in this study?
A computer program created by the authors of the study was used. The text was assumed to be alphagrams (a permutation of the letters of a word, in which all letters are ordered alphabetically) without vowels. Based on the text of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" in 380 languages, a computer algorithm was trained.
Promotional video:
When the algorithm's ability to match anagrams to modern words reached 97 percent, it was presented with the text of the first ten pages of the Voynich manuscript. The algorithm determined that 80 percent of the words are written in Hebrew.
The next step was to determine the encoding method. The first sentence of the text was offered to a scholar who is a native speaker of Hebrew. However, he could not translate it into meaningful English, and the task was offered to the Google Translate system. The first sentence was translated as "She advised the priest, the head of the house, me and the people." Although somewhat odd, the proposal makes sense.
Scientists also translated a part of 72 words known as "botanical", and as a result, the words "farmer", "light", "air", "fire" were identified.
Google Translate was used because this translator analyzes hundreds of millions of documents translated by humans and offers translation using a statistical approach.
The existing difficulties
The program was trained to translate modern languages, not 15th century dialects. even if the manuscript was written in Hebrew, it is 15th century Hebrew and not the one that knows Google Translate.
The algorithm has identified 80 percent of the text as Hebrew, which means 20 percent may be from other languages. Presumably these languages are Malay, Arabic, Amharic, very different from Hebrew.
Researchers do not claim to solve the riddle of the manuscript; they only think they have defined the language and how the text is encoded.
So far, it's not even possible to say with certainty whether the text is a cipher or an artificial language.
Other theories regarding the manuscript
In the past, other researchers have also assumed that the language of the manuscript is Hebrew. However, dozens of languages were considered for this role, including Latin and the language of the Sino-Tibetan group.
It is believed that the book contains the early discoveries and inventions of Roger Bacon. Or maybe this is a prayer book of a Christian sect in a distorted language, or the text is generally gibberish, and was compiled by some occultist for the purpose of sale.
Vadim Tarabarko
PS You can see the original Voynich manuscript following this link.