Scientists at the Mstislav Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences came to the conclusion that the Voynich manuscript was written in two languages with the exception of vowels. RIA Novosti reports.
According to experts, the contents of the manuscript are encrypted according to the following principle: vowels and spaces are removed from the text written in two languages. The resulting character sets are combined into a new text, having previously scattered spaces over it.
According to experts, approximately 60 percent of the text is written in English or German, and the rest is in one of the Romance languages - Italian or Spanish - or Latin.
Russian experts came to similar conclusions after conducting a statistical analysis of the text in the Voynich manuscript. In particular, the letter combinations and the distances between them, the Hurst exponent for different languages and the spectral portrait of the matrix of two-letter combinations were compared.
“However, I don’t know how important it is today to understand the text as such, because, judging by the drawings, it explains what time of year the poppy should be planted in order to get opium out of it later,” said study co-author Yuri Orlov.
In his opinion, it is not possible to restore the entire text without vocalization, since there are too many variants of meaningful words. Scientists are currently planning to identify the languages in which the manuscript is written.
The Voynich manuscript is a medieval work written in the 15th century by unknown authors. Researchers have been trying to decipher it for several hundred years, but no one knows the language of the manuscript. The artifact was discovered by the antiquary Wilfried Voynich in the ancient southern European castle of Villa Mondragone.
The complete Voynich Manuscript in PDF can be found here.
Promotional video: