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Voynich Manuscript Has Real Message After All, Say Scientists
Voynich Manuscript Has Real Message After All, Say Scientists
Dr Marcelo Montemurro from the University of Manchester and Dr Damian Zanette from the Centro Atómico Bariloche e Instituto Balseiro, Argentina, claim to have found linguistic patterns in the world’s most mysterious book, the Voynich manuscript.
Named after the antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich who owned it since 1912 until his death in 1930, the Voynich manuscript is a small book 23.5 x 16.2 cm of about 240 pages. It is written in a language that even the best cryptographers have been unable to decode. Nearly every page of the book contains scientific and botanical drawings in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red.
The manuscript’s ownership history can be traced back to the 17th century, but carbon dating of its vellum and stylistic analysis of its illustrations suggest that it was written around the second half of the 15th century.
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“The text is unique, there are no similar works and all attempts to decode any possible message in the text have failed. It’s not easy to dismiss the manuscript as simple nonsensical gibberish, as it shows a significant structure,” Dr Montemurro told BBC News.
The scientists used statistical methods from information theory that identify content-bearing words without any prior knowledge of the language under analysis.
“In our analysis, we used an information-theoretical measure that quantifies the amount of information that the distribution of words bears about the sections where they appear in the text. Words that are uniformly scattered contribute little or no information, since their distribution cannot tag any specific section of the text. On the contrary, words that appear only in certain contextual domains contribute much information, because their distribution identifies those specific sections,” Dr Montemurro and Dr Zanette wrote in a paper published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/linguistics/science-voynich-manuscript-message-01195.html
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