Voynich Manuscript

A brief introduction

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book, written in an unknown language. According to the radiocarbon dating it was written sometime between 1404-1438. The text has not yet been decrypted, and its history and provenance are very fuzzy. One way to determine the time of the book’s creation is according to the style of hairstyles, clothing, and castles shown in the illustrations. The book is named after Wilfrid Michael Voynich (Wojnicz, Vojnic), an American merchant of Polish-Lithuanian origin who acquired the manuscript in Italy in 1912.

Wilfrid Voynich

At present, the text is owned by Yale University under the designation MS408. The manuscript is the subject of interest of many scholars of various disciplines, especially cryptologists. It is also connected with the Czech environment, as the first known owners were scholars from Prague, and it is even possible that it was written there. The book probably had about 272 pages in 17 sheets, but only 240 were preserved. The text is written on parchment with unknown lettering (20-30 characters with simple punctuation) in an unknown language. In the entire book the characters and words distribution seems to be affected by grammatical rules and indicates the existence of spelling and grammar. Statistical analysis of the text suggests that Zipf’s law applies to the language used, the average length of each word is roughly the same as Latin and English. Importantly, the language used in Voynich’s manuscript is quite different from the European languages. However, some signs suggest similarities with Semitic [or Indo-European?] languages, although some scholars have suggested that the manuscript is of Latin American origin. Several words in the manuscript are also written in Latin, in a language reminiscent of ancient languages around the Mediterranean Sea, although it is possible that the Latin passages were added later. According to the human-generated classifications of the illustrations, the book is divided into several parts; it is likely that it is a tractate from several areas:

• Botanical part. The illustrations contain pictures of common European plants. However, most of them are difficult to identify; some have not yet been identified.

• Astronomical part. Illustrations include astronomical diagrams, astrological diagrams, and symbols, sketches of the zodiac. In some diagrams, the names of the months of the year are Latin, in Romanesque, perhaps in Catalan or Occitan.

• Biological part. The illustrations show mostly miniatures of naked women, bathers in strange formations, some of which resemble body organs. Some women have crowns.

• Cosmological part. Illustrations remind remotely of maps of a strange landscape or cosmological sketch. There are castles, perhaps volcanoes.

• Pharmacological part. Illustrations show parts of plants (roots, leaves). Perhaps it is a pharmaceutical prescription, which may also suggest that the text is divided into short paragraphs in this section.

• Recipes. Without illustrations, the text is divided into short paragraphs, separated by blooms or stars.

This project discusses the possible use of the power of the human mind on analysis and categorization of the unknown text. We selected the Voynich Manuscript (http://www.Voynichese.com, hereafter, VM) as the experimental text as it is the most famous illustration of a hand-written codex in an unknown writing system. The VM is full of symbols that were partially interpreted, and it is claimed that various plants, animals, a mineral, and cities were deciphered. These claims, however, have not been verified. Unaffiliated researchers and hobbyists have also pursued investigations into the Voynich Manuscript. Most studies of the Voynich Manuscript have relied on qualitative analysis, using the illustrations as benchmarks to demarcate the chapters and contents. Given recent advancements in computational linguistics methodology, we are now able to explore this document using rigorous, statistical approaches.

However it is not enough. We would like to ask you to help us to identify objects, letters, words and/or language origin of this book. Despite fact that a lot of people tried to „break this book“, no one succeeded and still, a lot of people do not know that topic. So, there is still a chance that someone has the right clue that leads to the solution.

References
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