Landini has shown that the collection of tokens satisfies Zipf’s law, with a smooth, approximately inverse relation between the number of occurrences of each token and its rank in a list of tokens ordered by decreasing frequency. Statistical analyses of the Voynich text regarded as a sequence of space-separated character arrays, or tokens -the manuscript’s “words”- are scarcer, but point toward the same conclusions as the character-based studies. Calculations of the second-order character entropy, word statistics and character autocorrelation measures, and random-walk-like fluctuations, reveal organizational structures that are compatible with a ciphered version of a real language, and make the possibility of a fabrication less likely. Most of the studies undertaken in this direction regarded the text as a symbolic sequence of characters (including the blank space). Transcriptions of the Voynich manuscript script into Roman script, replacing each grapheme of the former by an alphabetic character of the latter, have allowed for the statistical analysis of the text. Naturally, the hypothesis of a hoax -a smart fabrication contrived to deceive avid book collectors, of the sort that flourished after the Renaissance times- cannot be discarded either. Careful quantitative analysis of the text structure, however, has inspired some plausible hypotheses on the manuscrip’s cryptographic nature: while it is unlikely that the book is written in a European language using an unknown alphabetic script, it may be encoding an East Asian language (such as Chinese) into an alphabet invented specifically for such purpose, or contain a more sophisticated encryption of a then familiar language (Latin, for instance). Since the seventeenth century, numerous attempts at deciphering the script have led to a few claims of success, but none of them has been convincing. In spite of its unmistakable medieval-codex look, the origin, purpose, and contents of the Voynich manuscript remain a deep mystery. Similarly, except for the Zodiac signs in the Astrological section, no illustration could be unambiguously interpreted in the whole book.
Oddly enough, however, not a single one of these pictures could be unquestionably recognized as an existing plant. The Herbal section is the longest, and displays dozens of ravishingly coloured plant drawings. Most pages also contain illustrations, which modern scholars have used to “thematically” divide the manuscript into five sections: Herbal, Astrological, Biological, Pharmacological, and Recipes. These arrays are separated by spaces, and lines are sometimes grouped into paragraphs but, otherwise, no evident punctuation marks are used. The text consists of discrete graphemes, chosen from an “alphabet” of some 40 symbols and organized into arrays or “words” of variable length. Both sides of most folios contain text, written from left to right. The manuscript comprises 104 folios, organized into 18 quires bound to leather thongs.
#Voynich manuscript reproduction full
Public-domain electronic images of the full manuscript are deposited in Wikimedia Commons (/wiki/Voynich manuscript).
Presently, the book belongs to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, where it is identified as Beinecke MS 408. Greg Hodgins, University of Arizona, personal communication). The manuscript‚s ownership history can be traced back to the seventeenth century, but carbon dating of its vellum and stylistic analysis of its illustrations suggest that it was written around the second half of the fifteenth century (Dr. Its author and language are unknown, and no other document in the same script has ever been found. The Voynich manuscript–named after the Polish-American antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich, who owned it since 1912 until his death in 1930-is perhaps the most widely known example of a book written in an as yet undeciphered script.
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