For your enjoyment and edification:
I'm a bit out of date in finding this just now ... but it looks like a mathematician has developed a reasonable explanation of the source of the Voynich Manuscript.
http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/cs/staff/g.rugg/voynich/index.html
For those unfamiliar with the Voynich Manuscript, it purported to be a mystical, alchemical manual dating back at least to the 17th century written in an unknown and bizarre language and filled with mysterious and otherworldly drawings. (Google "Voynich Manuscript" for any number of histories, theories, etc.)
While the spectre of hoax hung over the book from the start, modern cryptographers had some problems with it. The seemingly gibberish text written in an unknown alphabet had statistical patterns that strongly suggested it was not randomly created. Languages have some pretty particular statistical aspects, and the Voynich Manuscript had enough of them to argue strongly against just random letters plopped down on the page. For many years cryptographers have struggled with the "translation" versus "elaborate hoax" problems that the manuscript posed. While no one could translate it, no one could figure out how a 17th century hoaxer could have made up a gibberish "language" that still contained the statistical patterns it had.
I have been interested in the Voynich Manuscript for about a decade, ever since I read about it in a book on languages. A fascinating piece of history/cryptography/deception and this new research fills in a piece of the puzzle nicely.
- Timothy
I'm a bit out of date in finding this just now ... but it looks like a mathematician has developed a reasonable explanation of the source of the Voynich Manuscript.
http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/cs/staff/g.rugg/voynich/index.html
For those unfamiliar with the Voynich Manuscript, it purported to be a mystical, alchemical manual dating back at least to the 17th century written in an unknown and bizarre language and filled with mysterious and otherworldly drawings. (Google "Voynich Manuscript" for any number of histories, theories, etc.)
While the spectre of hoax hung over the book from the start, modern cryptographers had some problems with it. The seemingly gibberish text written in an unknown alphabet had statistical patterns that strongly suggested it was not randomly created. Languages have some pretty particular statistical aspects, and the Voynich Manuscript had enough of them to argue strongly against just random letters plopped down on the page. For many years cryptographers have struggled with the "translation" versus "elaborate hoax" problems that the manuscript posed. While no one could translate it, no one could figure out how a 17th century hoaxer could have made up a gibberish "language" that still contained the statistical patterns it had.
I have been interested in the Voynich Manuscript for about a decade, ever since I read about it in a book on languages. A fascinating piece of history/cryptography/deception and this new research fills in a piece of the puzzle nicely.
- Timothy