Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

PLoS One. 2013 Jun 21;8(6):e66344. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0066344. Print 2013.

Abstract

The Voynich manuscript has remained so far as a mystery for linguists and cryptologists. While the text written on medieval parchment -using an unknown script system- shows basic statistical patterns that bear resemblance to those from real languages, there are features that suggested to some researches that the manuscript was a forgery intended as a hoax. Here we analyse the long-range structure of the manuscript using methods from information theory. We show that the Voynich manuscript presents a complex organization in the distribution of words that is compatible with those found in real language sequences. We are also able to extract some of the most significant semantic word-networks in the text. These results together with some previously known statistical features of the Voynich manuscript, give support to the presence of a genuine message inside the book.

MeSH terms

  • Data Mining / methods*
  • Humans
  • Information Theory*
  • Manuscripts as Topic
  • Semantics*

Grants and funding

The authors have no support or funding to report.