Scientists from the Institute of Applied Mathematics named after M. V. Keldysh Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, after conducting statistical research, we made sure that the text of the Voynich manuscript was written in two mixed languages with the exception of vowels.
Prior to that, all attempts to decipher a unique document and even simply understand whether it is a meaningful text failed. 600 years of futile effort! According to radiocarbon analysis, the book was written between 1404 and 1438, but still no one in the world can say what it is about. Cryptographers of the CIA and NSA, supercomputers, and even doctors of "occult sciences" have signed their complete impotence. And the latest message from cryptologist Gordon Rugg at Keele University in the UK reads: “The Voynich manuscript is fake. This “complex text” is easy to construct for anyone familiar with simple copying techniques.” It turns out that it is impossible to decipher it at all.
Russian mathematicians set themselves the task of understanding whether a document is a hoax, that is, a meaningless set of characters, or is it still an encrypted text? If the document is meaningful text, what language is it written in? Hypotheses were proposed about the structure of the text of the manuscript:
- it is written with a permutation of letters, - two symbols of a certain known alphabet correspond to one symbol of the manuscript, - there is a key manuscript, without which it is impossible to read the text, - the manuscript is a bilingual text, Promotional video:
- the text contains false spaces between words.
In the case of false spaces, the text can be easily read if you know which language to read. For instance:
Carrying spaces
However, even after the most primitive encryption - for example, the removal of vowels - the text already becomes unreadable.
Removal of vowels
Now we use the second language, English.
English text
Let's remove the vowels from this phrase.
Vowel removal
Let's translate the Russian phrase into Latin.
Cyrillic to Latin translation
And add to it the rest of the English phrase.
Adding an English phrase
Now let's break this phrase with spaces and offer cryptologists to decipher it.
Splitting with spaces
This very process, according to Russian mathematicians, was used in order to encrypt a text that was subsequently bought in 1912 by the antiquary Wilfried Voynich, the husband of the writer Ethel Lilian Voynich.
How did they get it? Analysts took the languages of the Indo-European group - it includes the Slavic subgroup, Germanic, Romance, Greek, Baku and Latin. We compared the Slavic group with the Uralic family of languages and the Finno-Ugric branch: the Ugric subgroup and the Baltic-Finnish subgroup. They also studied artificial languages: Esperanto, Interlingua, Volapuk, the language of the inhabitants of the planet Qo'noS - Klingon and the "elvish language" - Quenya. The letter combinations and the distances between them, the Hurst exponent * for different languages, the spectral portrait of the matrix of two-letter combinations were compared.
Hurst coefficient formula
Indeed, it turned out that by comparing the statistics, one can determine the closeness of Danish and Swedish, their remoteness from French and Italian, and find other family ties. It became clear that the manuscript was written in one of the European languages. If it was one language, it would most likely be Danish. But the randomness of the arrangement of the symbols suggests that the letters have been mixed with something else. Or is the text written in a specially developed language. By the way, it turned out that Tolkien's "elvish language" is very close to the interlingua language, while Esperanto and Volapuk are close to Latin. That is, the statistical properties of artificial languages are expectedly close to natural ones.
Analysis of the structure of the entire text of the manuscript revealed that the parts are intermixed. There is a "Botanical part", "Women's bodies", "Astrology" and "Mortars". They also differ in the structure of the text. As a result of the study, it was found that, most likely, the Voynich manuscript is written in a mixed language without vowels, 60% of the text is written in English or German, and 40% in Italian or Spanish, although it may be Latin. But what kind of information this text contains, scientists have yet to find out.
“Unfortunately, it is not possible to reconstruct the entire text without vocalization, since there are too many variants of meaningful words. I will give you one variant of understanding the text, and another specialist will draw a completely different meaning from these words. However, I do not 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 from it later. For us mathematicians, the most important point is testing mathematical tools: can we recognize the language as such? Now we know that it can be done. The next step is to understand what kind of mixed languages this text is written in,”explained Yuri Orlov, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, an employee of the Institute of Applied Mathematics named after M. V. Keldysh RAS.
See the original Voynich manuscript here