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

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 resear...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Montemurro, Marcelo Alejandro, Zanette, Damian Horacio
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2013
País:Argentina
Institución:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repositorio:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/541
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/541
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:INFORMATION THEORY
SIGNAL PROCESSING
QUANTITATIVE LINGUISTICS
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1.2
Descripción
Sumario: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.