Voynich Reconsidered
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Voynich Reconsidered
In this book, Dr. Robert Edwards brings a fresh, mathematical perspective to the Voynich manuscript and sets out a strategy whereby the interested reader could extract meaning from the seemingly impenetrable symbols . . . if meaning is there to be found. The Voynich manuscript has been described as the most mysterious document in the world. In 1637, a Bohemian scholar sent a mysterious manuscript to the celebrated professor Athanasius Kircher in Rome. Kircher promised to decipher it when the mood took him. He never did. Later, antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid Voynich claimed that he had discovered it in 1912 in a castle in Europe. • Contains hundreds of bizarre illustrations that seem to represent plants, stars, animals, zodiac signs, strange receptacles, and naked women in pools and streams of green water. • Throughout its over 200 pages are strings of glyphs or symbols that look like words; but the symbols do not belong to any known living or extinct languages. • No one knows what these symbols mean—or even whether they mean anything, though hundreds of scholars have tried to decipher them for 500 years. • Today, all that we know for sure is that the parchment probably dates from the early 15th century.
Voynich Manuscript
""Voynich Manuscript"" explores the enduring enigma of a 15th-century book written in an unknown language and filled with bizarre illustrations. This historical puzzle has baffled cryptographers, linguists, and historians for centuries. The book investigates the manuscript's unique script, its strange botanical depictions, and the various attempts to decipher its true meaning, offering insights into medieval science and culture. The book explores how the manuscript's potential decryption could unlock secrets about lost languages or scientific thought. The book adopts a multi-faceted approach, combining linguistic analysis, computational techniques, and historical context. It begins by examining the physical characteristics of the manuscript, such as its parchment and inks. It then moves into linguistic analyses, exploring attempts to identify the language family and evaluating decryption keys. Later chapters delve into the botanical illustrations, comparing them to known medieval herbals. Finally, the book explores computational linguistics and pattern recognition techniques, using algorithms to identify patterns and generate potential translations. Through a fact-based lens, the book presents a nuanced perspective on the manuscript's possible origins and purpose. Even without a complete translation, valuable information can be gleaned regarding the manuscript's structure, authorship, and intended audience. By addressing controversies and presenting different viewpoints, the book offers a comprehensive overview of the manuscript and the ongoing research surrounding it.
The Voynich Manuscript as an Example of Oligo-Agglutinative Pasigraphy, Vol. I: A Fuzzy Set Approach to Decryption
Class III problems are considered practically unsolvable in cryptology, but none has resisted cryptanalytic attack as persistently as the Voynich Manuscript. In the first installment of this 4-volume set, we present the linguistic and affix analysis that preceded the first complete but approximate translation of the entire manuscript. This contrasts with the piecemeal approach of all prior solutions that resulted in wildly divergent translations of minuscule selections of the text. This systemic attack on the entirety of the text and its unusual distributional features (such as extreme platykurtia, which forbid translation into any natural language) resulted first in superior transcription stability and an equally stable symbol set, based on intensive statistical analysis. The encoding scheme employs a 20-22 letter alphabetic script that most closely resembles a slot-and-filler, top-down, a priori pasigraphic system, with oligo-agglutinative features that are currently only considered a theoretical possibility in the linguistics field. The intricate affixing system is based mainly on precise placement of single letters to denote case roles, semantic classes and 3 primary parts of speech (exhibiting a strong noun surfeit). At the phrase level we find dominant SOV order and head-final, dependent-marked grammar compatible with heavily formatted, inline pharmaceutical lists; these result in short ranges of actionable information, which no competing solution can claim. Plant descriptions are demoted in comparison to other herbals, in favor of processing and dispensing details. This approximate solution is based on fuzzy set analysis techniques integrated with linguistic universals, a wide range of common statistics (Pareto and Sukhotin scores, Zipf slopes, Indexes of Coincidence, Agglutination and Synthesis and dozens of others) and many home-brewed fuzzy algorithms implemented in T-SQL and VB.Net, after the inadequacy of many advanced data mining techniques was demonstrated. Our methodology was validated when the project reached an inflection point, beyond which we were able to predict the identities and properties of plants based on the text alone. The project ended with plausible identification candidates for 121 of 126 herbal section plants and 7 others elsewhere in the manuscript, far beyond that of other published solutions. An incredible 100% of the 133 identified plants have dermatological uses. These can be divided into prominent subtopics like treatment of bites; anthelmintics; rheumatism and other musculo-skeletal ailments; inflammatory skin disorders; external and possibly menstrual bleeding; excision of blemishes; application of cosmetics; and cures dispensable in baths. The centerpiece of the manuscript is the "Rosette Folio," which depicts the grand design of a medieval bathhouse, keyed to specific astrological timings also defined by satellite diagrams following a precedence hierarchy. Each of these uses exhibit telltale polygraph correlations that fall into a handful of semantic hierarchies constructed from highly similar bases, such as skin color based diagnostic criteria, remedies/solutions, problems/diseases, plant parts and the like. These findings require 2 volumes to demonstrate and another volume of data and other supplementary material. Despite this complexity, they culminate in a drastic simplification of the script and the first-ever comprehensive translation of the Voynich Manuscript in Volume IV, albeit at low resolution.