What makes any mystery more interesting? Being unsolved for 600 years!
A fifteenth century document known as the Voynich Manuscript has puzzled linguists, historians, and code breakers alike. Even after all this time, no one has been able to decipher the manuscript’s language (including famous mathematician Alan Turing and the FBI). As many now wonder, is the language even real?
This question attracted the attention of Yale Linguistics professor Claire Bowern who specializes in historical linguistics. She believes it’s highly unlikely that the manuscript is just some hoax and, along with linguist Luke Lindemann, wrote a recent paper analyzing past research.
Let’s break down their findings.
- Two secret codes are better than one. The manuscript’s language might be two different ways of encoding one original language.
- It’s not entirely unreadable. The manuscript contains some Latin words and numbers.
- The best evidence for it being real is that the manuscript’s structure is too similar to that of a natural language. Certain characters are often found at the beginning or end of lines, hinting at a linguistic structure that could start with a noun or end with a verb.
- The type-token ratio is a comparison of different words to total words. If a language has a higher ratio, it will be more morphologically complex. The manuscript fell into the medium range alongside Germanic and Iranian languages.
- Based on the sheer complexity of the document, it seems impossible for it to be all made up. You try writing a couple hundred pages of pure gibberish- it’s not as easy as you think!
- The only strange aspect was the character entropy, or the amount of disorder in the text, which was quite low. This means the manuscript had oddly predictable character sequences that could be faked. Or it could mean the text was purposefully repetitive, as suggested by a recent paper claiming the manuscript repeats heretical Cather religious beliefs and is encoded in Arabic (link below).
The manuscript now takes up residence in Yale’s library. You can click through all the pages using a link below. I have also included a link to Bowern’s paper.
While I find these arguments pretty convincing, you’ll have to make up your own mind about this linguistic mystery. Is it truly a document of an undiscovered language or the prank of a bored medieval writer?
Read More
Bowern, Claire & Lindemann, Luke. (2021). The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript. Annual Review of Linguistics. 7. 10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030613. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030613.
Cipher manuscript (Voynich manuscript). General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Cipher manuscript – Yale University Library.
Crowe, Fletcher. (2022). The Voynich Manuscript: Decoded. Journal of Historical Archaeology & Anthropological Sciences. 7. 94-131. 10.15406/jhaas.2022.07.00262. (PDF) The Voynich Manuscript: Decoded (researchgate.net).