Voynich Manuscript – the mysterious medieval manuscript written in an unknown language, alphabet unknown and has not been translated, – yet not a fake, learned Italian physicist.
dispute that cryptographers, mathematicians and linguists are carrying around this artifact has been one hundred years old, continues: some call it a clever fake, others insist on its authenticity. In the latest issue of the journal Plos One provides further evidence that the mysterious manuscript has not been tampered. The authors – a theoretical physicist Marcelo Montemurro of Manchester University, and his colleague from Argentina Damian Zanetti – treating an electronic version of the text of information theory, argue that they have found clusters of words clearly have meaning, and that, most likely, the manuscript contains some encrypted message.
First manuscript was born in the seventeenth century, although the radiocarbon method of writing it relates to the beginning of the fifteenth century.
According to the letter, detected in our own time, in 1639, the manuscript belonged to the Prague alchemist George Baresch. After the death of the alchemist’s manuscript changed hands at least twice, finally got to the Jesuits, and disappeared out of sight for two centuries: suppose that all this time he was kept in the library of the Collegio. In 1912, the Collegio Romano was in the strictest confidence to sell his collection of manuscripts, some of them were bought by Kaunas bibliophile and bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, and since that time it tried unsuccessfully to decipher.
In 1966, his widow Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of the novel in the USSR “The Gadfly”) sold the manuscript to another bookseller, who three years later gave the manuscript to Yale University, where he was kept till now time.
manuscript is written by hand on 240 pages of medieval parchment contains about 35,000 “words” composed of 20-30 characters, the text stripped of punctuation, almost every page is illustrated. Most often it is images of plants, and many consider him the ancient guide to poisons, but that’s an oddity: Almost all these plants are unknown today’s science.
However, strange things there in abundance. Language (if it is the language) is unlikely to apply to the European one, in any case, there is no connecting words consisting of one or two letters. Some find in it similarities with Hebrew, there is even a version of his Russian origins. Today, many are inclined to think that if the manuscript is not mindless imitation, he invented an artificial written language, have a clear logical structure.
curious that the manuscript was written sure hand, as if the language of the author, and these letters were accustomed.
Be that as it may, deciphering the text has not yet yielded any closer, the best cryptographers broke the world on his teeth. That’s why pretty soon there was a version that is not nothing but a very clever hoax: say, once the text is indecipherable, it’s just a bunch of gibberish, filigree attempt to mislead the reader, making him think that the meaning of it all -still there.
And it seems there really is. Montemurro, senior author of the paper in Plos One, argues that its use of technology identified in the text of “clusters” of words that are bound to specific illustrations. He did not elaborate on their grammar, not trying to decipher, he was just able to see the keywords and show that the frequency with which they occur in the text, under the same laws as the frequency of words in normal Nepridumannoe languages.
To reach this conclusion, the authors were subjected to the same analysis of the Latin texts, English-language “The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin and many other texts.
As expected, the skeptics opening Montemurro not particularly persuaded.
«He did not say anything new – says one of them, Gordon Rugg, a professor at Keele University (UK). – Such similarity statistical characteristics, but does not like, has long been observed. ” Rugg argues that the text-mystification, obeying the laws of normal language, it is possible to make, without giving it any meaning. He even invented a text, something like voynichevskogo version of our “Glock Kuzdra”, which at one time, “Steck budlanula bokra and kurdyachit bokrenka».
Montemurro, however, remains convinced he was right: the text, they are analyzed, subject to the laws that are not in the seventeenth, even more so in the fifteenth century were not known. He agrees that his analysis of the majority of questions asked by the Voynich manuscript, left unanswered. For example, he can not say, invented language, or whether it already exists and deliberately distorted. He claims that the version of hoaxes remain untenable as long as its proponents do not present convincing evidence that identified them as complex semantic structures could get into a meaningless text.
«In this text, – he says – must stand a story that perhaps we will never know».
No comments:
Post a Comment