The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript

Abstract

The Voynich Manuscript is a fifteenth-century illustrated cipher manuscript. In this overview of recent approaches to the Voynich Manuscript, we summarize and evaluate current work on the language that underlies this document. We provide arguments for treating the document as natural language (rather than a medieval hoax) and show how statistical arguments can be made about the phonology, morphology, and structure of the document even though the contents remain undecipherable. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 7 is January 14, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Character Entropy in Modern and Historical Texts: Comparison Metrics for an Undeciphered Manuscript

“…We have described the creation of a corpus of Voynich texts and two comparison corpora for analyzing Voynichese from a broad typological perspective. In addition to the character-level analysis given here, we have used these corpora for our overview in Bowern and Lindemann (2020) and will continue to use them in subsequent analyses.…”

“…In this section, we demonstrate the usage of the Historical and Wikipedia corpora by examining the character-level properties of Voynichese. As discussed in Bowern and Lindemann (2020), we are particularly interested in the metric of conditional character entropy, or second-order character entropy (h2 ). Conditional character entropy is a measure of the overall predictability of characters in a text.…”

“…This means that Voynichese characters are unusually predictable compared to most European languages. We discuss the definition of conditional character entropy and the history of its application to the Voynich manuscript more thoroughly in Bowern and Lindemann (2020).…”

“…Guy (1991a) applied the algorithm to two folios of the Voynich text. For further discussion of the Sukhotin algorithm and its usage in Voynich analysis, see Bowern and Lindemann (2020).…”

Subtle Signs of Scribal Intent in the Voynich Manuscript

“…The script exhibits a noticeable conformity to the outline shapes of the drawn illustrations. Some researchers have noticed and analyzed the positional aspect of word tokens with respect to the beginning and ending of lines (Bunn, 2022;Bowern and Lindemann, 2021). The present study, however, looks in detail at token positions not only at line boundaries, but adjacent to the hand-drawn illustrations.…”