Not so long ago, Russian mathematicians discerned in the mysterious Voynich manuscript the process of obtaining the opium poppy and even told in what languages it was written. True, they immediately made a reservation that despite all this, they could not decipher it in any way. How can you figure out the language and not be able to read the text in it and what is actually hidden behind the manuscript?
The Voynich manuscript has been actively discussed by researchers around the world for 105 years, since its discovery by the merchant of ancient manuscripts Wilfried Voynich. The text contains many illustrations. In addition to women of varying degrees of undress, there are painted signs of the zodiac, many plants, several animals and one castle. All this clearly points to the European culture of the time when it is believed to have been created.
The parchment dates from the first half of the 15th century. Inks are also similar to European ones. It would seem that the language should be the same. Alas, the uniqueness of this text is that all its 170 thousand characters are written in an unknown alphabet of a maximum of 30 letters. At the same time, the distribution of these letters does not resemble any of the known languages - a puzzle in a cube.
Eustace to Alex, plant the opium poppy in barrels
Scientists from the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences proposed their own solution to the problem. In the text of their work - not published, however, in any peer-reviewed journal - they said that it was written in a mixture of German and Spanish, from which all vowels were removed to encrypt the message. After that, the phrases of the first language were glued together with the second and torn with spaces in the wrong place.
Mathematicians give an example: the Russian phrase "it is impossible to talk about words only because of the presence of pr obel" plus the English let us talk about this text was turned into "nlpgvrtslvhtlxhdznlchprblv" and ltstlkbtthstxt. After that they were merged and written in the romanized alphabet as nlpgvrtslvhtlkshdznlxprblv. The Cyrillic alphabet was removed from the final phrase, because otherwise it would be much easier to decipher it.
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When asked how such a linguistic Frankenstein can be read, one of the authors honestly answered: “It is not possible to restore the entire text … because there are too many variants of meaningful words. I will give you one version of understanding the text, and another specialist will draw a completely different meaning from these words."
However, they continue their thought, there is nothing to worry about. For it is clear from the pictures: the text tells what time of the year the poppy should be planted in order to get opium out of it later.
The inconsistencies came out
After the story of the poppy, representatives of other sciences began to worry and express dissatisfaction. The fact is that among the many illustrations of the manuscript, there is, strictly speaking, not a single plant that at least one botanist would identify as a poppy.
Moreover, the very assumption of mathematicians from the RAS is an anachronism. Yes, in the 21st century, the opium poppy is illegal and the recommendations on it, maybe it makes sense to encrypt. But in medieval Europe in the middle of the last millennium, it was completely legal and was considered as a medicine.
There was no point in writing a complex cipher text about its cultivation in an incomprehensible alphabet. It was easier to pay a little to the peasant, and he himself would have poured raw materials for opium to the needy. Mac grew up in Europe since ancient times, did not have the modern aura of a drug and was so popular that at that time it was recommended even for diarrhea. No one particularly needed to be told when it needed to be planted. This is the same as inventing a new alphabet for a coded treatise on garlic growing these days.
Okay, let's turn to the text of the work itself. The authors write in it - however, without bringing this evidence base - that Indo-European languages, unlike, for example, the Uralic languages, must obey the distribution of the Hirst exponent. However, scientists admit that if we proceed from the fact that the text of the manuscript is in one language, then it does not obey it.
From this, the researchers do not conclude that the language is non-Indo-European, but that the manuscript is written in a mixture of two languages. Why? Simply because they have chosen such a hypothesis - they do not give any justification for choosing the version about two languages.
One could begin to argue, tell that the distribution of the Hurst exponent (as the authors call it themselves in the work) is practically not used by linguists, but we will not. The authors of the work are not linguists and, unlike a number of other mathematicians working at the interface with this field of science, show moderate attention to purely linguistic argumentation. For example, they casually write that the Basque language is Indo-European.
There is no linguist on planet Earth who would agree with this. The fact that the Basque language is a unique one that has no close relatives among living languages is known to everyone who was generally interested in languages. If mathematicians do not agree with linguists even on such a well-known issue, then it is simply useless to present other arguments from the same set.
Even if we ignore linguistics, the hypothesis of Russian mathematicians has many problems. If the authors of the text ("alchemists", as they vaguely write about them in their work) encrypted their text so difficult, then it is not clear why they developed a completely new alphabet.
As mathematicians themselves accurately point out, it is unrealistic to declassify such a text, even using ordinary alphabets. The manuscript contains 170 thousand characters in the new alphabet, and all of them, according to handwriting analysis, are written fluently and without blots. How much time do you need to spend to develop cursive using an invented set of letters, and why is it necessary?
Abracadabra?
Attempts to crack the manuscript by mathematical methods have been going on for many decades. Even the ciphers from the NSA managed to have a hand in her. They did not succeed, and out of despair many began to say that the manuscript did not contain meaningful text. Like, this is a collection of magic spells, there can be any gibberish. Someone decided to sell it to gullible customers as an ancient book of spells - and wrote some nonsense.
This hypothesis has serious problems: Zipf's law is observed for the Voynich manuscript. If you take words in any book and arrange them in descending order of frequency of use, then the second most popular word will occur approximately two times less often than the first, the tenth - ten times less, and so on.
There is such a thing in Darwin's Origin of Species, Melville's Moby Dick, Gogol's Dead Souls, and Voynich's find. There was no one to fake compliance with Zipf's law in the XV-XVI centuries for the simple reason that this law was discovered in the XX century - after the first publications about the manuscript.
True, Russian mathematicians stated that Zipf's law is incorrect for natural languages. But, alas, their work was not accepted in the peer-reviewed journal, which is why they, perhaps, went with them to the media. On the other hand, works proving that this is not so are fully published in such journals. Taking into account the stories about Indo-European Basque, it is better to write off this idea of mathematicians on their poor acquaintance with the basics of linguistic science.
Non-Western languages and Western culture
Linguists have long noticed that the manuscript contains no articles or linking verbs. In Western languages they are very common, but they are not very common in Eastern languages. There are also words that are repeated two or three times in a row, like in Chinese or Vietnamese. Perhaps the author is a man from the East who adapted his language to the alphabet he invented of 20-30 characters?
This version has one weak link - all cultural features of the manuscript are Western. Nude women in Western European style, signs of the zodiac (albeit a lizard instead of Scorpio), finally, a castle with teeth "dovetail", as on the walls of the Kremlin. All this strongly resembles Italy of the 15th-16th centuries - where, by the way, came the architects who gave the Kremlin these teeth.
One way out between two worlds
The American botanists Arthur Tucker and Rexford Talbert not so long ago tried to find people who, on the one hand, would grow up on Western culture, and on the other, would use a completely non-Western language. They published an article in HerbalGram in which they tried to understand the main mystery of the manuscript illustrations.
Most of them are drawings of plants, but ones that no one has ever seen. You can find those with the desired leaf or root shape, and so on. But it’s almost impossible to find real plants that would combine all the details depicted - about the same as finding in reality plants with plantain leaves, dandelion roots and mallow flowers. And the number of species of such fictional plants in the illustrations is very large.
Tucker and Talbort turned to their personal experience teaching botany in high schools. From year to year, with enviable consistency, their students sketched the plant for speed: first the most unusual and prominent part, then another, "attached" - for example, a hypertrophied flower, if the name of this plant mentions the word "flower", and so on.
Based on the assumption that the illustrations were made in a "student" way, botanists tried to isolate the most unusual components in plants and link them to real ones.
Botanists from the United States claim that this is exactly a two-color, and not a three-color violet - that is, the author of the manuscript knew about it, unlike European scientists of that time.
The results were surprising. Most of all, they were struck by the violet of the species Viola bicolor, found on the pages of the manuscript. The fact is that this plant was generally not known to European science until at least the 19th century. It grows in the New World and in the sketch differs from the usual Viola tricolor (tricolor violet or pansies), which we are used to in the Old World.
Found - if we consider the method of depicting plants "student" - there are cacti of the Central American species.
It turns out that the manuscript was made by a person who knew something that there was no one in Europe at the time of writing the manuscript. Moreover, he had a lot of information about the flora of North America. To find out other plants, the authors took the Aztec collection of herbalists during the Spanish colonization - the Cruz-Badianus codex.
The plants in it are sketched in a style far from modern botany, but often similar to the Voynich manuscript. The differences in the style of the sketches are quite understandable: the code was drawn by the Aztecs, who had not gone through the European school of painting, who were familiar with it only from the few imported samples in the colonies.
Honestly, even in Europe at that time, the art of sketching flora and fauna was not brilliant. Simply put, they drew as best they could, and you shouldn't blame them for the fact that the plants did not look like real ones.
In total, 37 of the 303 plants of the codex were identified on the pages of the Voynich manuscript. Their habitat: from Texas and California to Nicaragua. The most likely place where they can be seen at the same time, American botanists considered Central Mexico.
Taking into account the similarity with the Cruz-Badianus codex, created immediately after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the researchers considered the author of the Voynich manuscript to be an Aztec who created his own alphabet based on new letters and decided to write down some data about local plants and properties attributed to them in their native language.
There is nothing unrealistic about creating an alphabet this way. The leader of the Sequoia Indians, who does not come from such a civilized people as the Aztecs, in a short time created more than one new writing system and even published a newspaper in the resulting alphabet. No one taught him European writing, but he saw the corresponding letters and reworked their system to the best of his imagination and abilities.
Indirect evidence of the Aztec theory - strange bluish dyes, nowhere else at that time in written sources. In 2009, they were identified by the expert examination as attack and sick. Both minerals were found only in the New World - it hurts so generally only in one mine in Baja California. It was typical of the Americas, but unknown in Europe until at least the end of the 16th century.
The happy end is far away
However, with all the advantages of "botanical" decoding, it is extremely far from its successful completion. The fact is that the population of Mexico at the time of the creation of the manuscript spoke dozens of dialects of Nahuatl, many of which have died out by our time along with their carriers. The epidemics brought by Europeans killed many Aztecs, often depopulating entire villages.
In fact, the author of the manuscript could not be an Aztec, but a representative of the nobility of the peoples they conquered. At the time of the destruction of the Aztec empire, they were allies of Cortez. In gratitude, the Spanish authorities did not question their status for a long time. There were special schools in which the children of the local nobility received a Europeanized education.
However, the language of such people could be very different from the mass Nahuatl of the Aztecs who have survived to this day. It is difficult to decipher writing on this basis. One thing is for sure: it is not nearly as difficult as looking for information in the Voynich manuscript about "when you need to sow a poppy to get opium out of it."
You can read the original Voynich Manuscript following this link.
Alexander Berezin