Word Probability Findings in the Voynich Manuscript
Colin Layfield, Lonneke van der Plas, Michael Rosner, John Abela
Abstract
The Voynich Manuscript has baffled scholars for centuries. Some believe the elaborate 15th century codex to be a hoax whilst others believe it is a real medieval manuscript whose contents are as yet unknown. In this paper, we provide additional evidence that the text of the manuscript displays the hallmarks of a proper natural language with respect to the relationship between word probabilities and (i) average information per subword segment and (ii) the relative positioning of consecutive subword segments necessary to uniquely identify words of different probabilities.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.lt4hala-1.11
- Volume:
- Proceedings of LT4HALA 2020 - 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Editors:
- Rachele Sprugnoli, Marco Passarotti
- Venue:
- LT4HALA
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- 74–78
- Language:
- English
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.lt4hala-1.11
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Colin Layfield, Lonneke van der Plas, Michael Rosner, and John Abela. 2020. Word Probability Findings in the Voynich Manuscript. In Proceedings of LT4HALA 2020 - 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages, pages 74–78, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
- Cite (Informal):
- Word Probability Findings in the Voynich Manuscript (Layfield et al., LT4HALA 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2020.lt4hala-1.11.pdf