Keywords and co-occurrence patterns in the Voynich manuscript: An information-theoretic analysis

• Autores: Montemurro, Marcelo Alejandro; Zanette, Damian Horacio
• Año de publicación: 2013
• Idioma: inglés
• Tipo de recurso: artículo
• Materia: INFORMATION THEORY; SIGNAL PROCESSING; QUANTITATIVE LINGUISTICS
• Institución: Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

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.
Fil: Montemurro, Marcelo Alejandro. UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER;
Fil: Zanette, Damian Horacio. Comision Nacional de Energia Atomica. Gerencia D/area Invest y Aplicaciones No Nucleares. Gerencia de Fisica (cab);