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

Autor: Marcelo A Montemurro, Damián H Zanette
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2013
Předmět:
Zdroj: PLoS ONE, Vol 8, Iss 6, p e66344 (2013)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1932-6203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0066344
Popis: 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.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals