Cryptographer calls Voynich manuscript a cunning hoax
The famous Voynich manuscript, which cannot be deciphered, is an elegant forgery of a medieval joker. This is the conclusion reached by researcher Gordon Rugg from Keele University, who has been deciphering this text for ten years.
One of the most famous cryptographic mysteries of recent decades is the famous Voynich manuscript. Many linguists and mathematicians are struggling to decipher it, but so far without success.
However, it looks like a long-awaited breakthrough has emerged in the mysterious code case.
The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious 15th century manuscript, which scientists have been struggling to decipher for more than a dozen years. It was acquired in 1912 by the antique dealer Wilfried Voynich, after whom it is named. And in 1969, second-hand bookseller Hans Kraus, who had previously bought the manuscript from Wilfried's heiress Ethel Voynich, donated it to the library of rare books at Yale University Beinecke, where the old code is kept to this day. From this moment, the history of the study and decryption of the mysterious text begins.
The manuscript contains 240 pages of thin parchment. Pages are numbered, but most likely much later than the book was written. The gaps in the numbering, most likely, mean that some of the sheets were lost even before the acquisition of the book by Voynich. The original codex was at least 242 pages long. In addition to the text, the manuscript contains many crudely colored illustrations in abundance.
According to the results of radiocarbon analysis, scientists have determined that the parchment for the manuscript was made between 1404 and 1438.
This assessment is indirectly confirmed by the only realistic illustration of the code - the image of a city with a fortress wall with dovetail battlements. Such walls were widespread in Italy in the first half of the 15th century.
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The manuscript is written in a unique alphabet that is no longer found anywhere in the world. But at the same time, the handwriting is stable and clear, as if the alphabet was familiar to the scribe and he understood what he was writing. The first studies of the book showed that the text obeys certain phonetic and spelling rules. Some signs appear in almost every word (like vowels in Russian or English), some never follow others, and some can be doubled in a word (like two "n" in the word "long"). At the same time, the text differs from European languages.
The code contains almost no words longer than ten letters or, conversely, one- and two-letter words.
Inside the word, the letters are also unusually distributed: some characters appear only at the beginning of the word, others only at the end. These syntactic features make the manuscript text related to Arabic or some East Asian languages. In 1976, physicist William Bennett conducted a frequency analysis of the text of the manuscript. It turned out that the frequency of repetition of words corresponds to Zipf's law, which is characteristic precisely for natural languages, that is, languages for communication between people.
Zipf's law is a special pattern of the distribution of words in a natural language, according to which the frequency of occurrence in the text of each word will be inversely proportional to its ordinal number. For example, the second most commonly used word occurs about half as often as the first, the third - three times less often than the first, and so on.
After the first unsuccessful attempts to decipher the Voynich manuscript, it became one of the most famous mysteries of cryptology. Over the decades of text research, mathematicians, linguists and cryptographers have not come to a consensus on the nature of the code. It is still unknown whether the book was written in natural language, a filigree forgery or a special cunning code. Also, the question of the authorship of the code remains controversial. At various times, there have been speculations about Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, and even aliens. In the hope of connecting new people to unraveling the mysteries of the manuscript, in August 2016 the Spanish publishing house Siloe was granted the right to publish 898 exact copies of the manuscript.
When making copies, special aged paper will be used, which repeats the structure of the original parchment as much as possible. Copies will be sent to the largest libraries in the world.
However, Gordon Rugg of Keele University in the UK is convinced that researchers are wasting their time. After ten years of studying the mysterious text in an article published in the journal Cryptologia, he came to the conclusion that such a forgery is not too difficult to make.
“We have known for many years that the syllables in the text are not random. That is, I want to say that there is a way to get meaningless text that will not seem random in statistical analysis,”he explains. - It looks like dice. If you roll the dice, you have six variants of the symbol."
Using the so-called Cardano lattice - a special tool for encrypting and decrypting text - Ragg tried to recreate text similar to the text from the code. To do this, the researcher collected all the symbols and syllables of the manuscript in one table, having previously determined which symbols we consider to be the roots of words, and which are suffixes and prefixes. After that, Rugg made several cardboard grids with holes for symbols. By moving the lattices over the table and writing down the resulting symbols, the researcher received a text similar to the text of Voynich's book.
Photo: Rugg et. al./sciencealert.com
Statistical analysis showed that the artificial text also fits Zipf's law well, as if it were a natural language.
Based on his research, Gordon Rugg argues that the mysterious code is nothing more than a hoax of some medieval joker.
But many researchers disagree with Rugg's arguments. Marcelo Montemurro from the University of Manchester in the UK argues that the manuscript does contain meaningful text. In an interview with New Scientist, he explained that the Voynich code is too complex to be just a hoax. Montemurro found statistically significant similarities between the text in the part containing botanical drawings and in the pharmaceutical part of the manuscript.
According to the scientist, the text and drawings have a semantic connection.
“This means that whoever was doing this hoax had to be aware of these subtleties of the text that are not visible if you just look at it,” explained Montemurro. The scientist also noticed that in order to prove the falsity of the text, all its features must be explained.
By the way, the popularity of the Voynich manuscript gave rise to a whole wave of imitations, the most famous of which is the Codex Seraphinianus. It is a book written and illustrated by the Italian architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini in the late 1970s. Also, it has not yet been deciphered.
Vyacheslav Avdeev