On the Voynich Manuscript
Actually fascinating article on the ancient-manuscript students who’re making use of their methods to the Voynich Manuscript.
Nobody has been capable of perceive the writing but, however there are some new understandings:
Davis offered her findings on the medieval-studies convention and printed them in 2020 within the journal Manuscript Research. She had hardly solved the Voynich, however she’d opened it to new sorts of investigation. If 5 scribes had come collectively to jot down it, the manuscript was in all probability the work of a group, reasonably than of a single deranged thoughts or con artist. Why the group used its personal language, or code, stays a thriller. Whether or not it was a cloister of alchemists, or mad monks, or a gaggle just like the medieval Béguines—a secluded order of Christian ladies—required extra research. However the marks of frequent use signaled that the manuscript served some routine, maybe each day perform.
Davis’s work introduced like-minded students out of hiding. In simply the previous few years, a Yale linguist named Claire Bowern had begun performing refined analyses of the textual content, constructing on the efforts of earlier students and on strategies Bowern had used with undocumented Indigenous languages in Australia. On the College of Malta, pc scientists have been determining find out how to analyze the Voynich with instruments for natural-language processing. Researchers discovered that the manuscript’s roughly 38,000 phrases—and 9,000-word vocabulary—had most of the statistical hallmarks of precise language. The Voynich’s commonest phrase, no matter it meant, appeared roughly twice as usually because the second-most-common phrase and 3 times as usually because the third-commonest, and so forth—a touchstone of pure language often called Zipf’s regulation. The combo of phrase lengths and the ratio of distinctive phrases to whole phrases have been equally language-like. Sure phrases, furthermore, appeared to comply with each other in predictable order, a doable signal of grammar.
Lastly, every of the textual content’s sections—as outlined by the drawings of vegetation, stars, bathing ladies, and so forth—had completely different units of overrepresented phrases, simply as one would count on in an actual ebook whose chapters targeted on completely different topics.
Spelling was the chief aberration. The Voynich alphabet—if that’s what it was—appeared to have a traditional 20-odd letters. However in contrast with identified languages, too a lot of these letters repeated in the identical order, each inside phrases and throughout neighboring phrases, like a kids’s rhyme. In some locations, the spellings of adjoining phrases so converged {that a} single phrase repeated two or 3 times in a row. A tough English equal may be one thing akin to “She sells sea shells by the ocean shore.” One other chance, Bowern informed me, was one thing like pig Latin, or the Yiddishism—often called “shm-reduplication”—that begets phrases resembling fancy shmancy and guidelines shmules.
Posted on August 13, 2024 at 7:04 AM •
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