Seminario interdisciplinare
ore
16:00
presso Seminario I
The Voynich manuscript is a medieval text that has so far resisted all
attempts of decipherment. It is often referred as the "most mysterious
manuscript" and is considered a cryptographic and linguistic enigma. Its
vellum has been dated to the second half of the 15th century, but apart from
that, its origin, purpose, and meaning, still remain unknown. Here we
overview some recent statistical evidence and present new findings supporting
the hypothesis that the Voynich manuscript contains a genuine linguistic
structure. We describe novel approaches to the problem of the Voynich
manuscript using methods from information theory and statistics that quantify
global patterns in the distribution of words. These methods allow the
extraction of putative semantic networks between the most informative words.
We also present recent evidence coming from the scaling properties of word
frequencies and correlations that points towards an underlying structure
compatible with natural languages. Finally, we discuss possible new research
pathways that could be followed to shed some light on the mystery of the
Voynich Manuscript.