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      The Voynich manuscript: Symbol roles revisited

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          Abstract

          In this article, we employ simple descriptive methods in order to explore the peculiar behavior of the symbols in the Voynich Manuscript. Such an analysis reveals a group of symbols which are further analyzed for the possibility of being compounds (or ligatures), using a specifically developed method. The results suggest the possibility that the alphabet of the manuscript is a lot smaller, and steganographic type of encoding is proposed to explain the newly revealed properties.

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          Multidimensional scaling: I. Theory and method

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            Random Texts Do Not Exhibit the Real Zipf's Law-Like Rank Distribution

            Background Zipf's law states that the relationship between the frequency of a word in a text and its rank (the most frequent word has rank , the 2nd most frequent word has rank ,…) is approximately linear when plotted on a double logarithmic scale. It has been argued that the law is not a relevant or useful property of language because simple random texts - constructed by concatenating random characters including blanks behaving as word delimiters - exhibit a Zipf's law-like word rank distribution. Methodology/Principal Findings In this article, we examine the flaws of such putative good fits of random texts. We demonstrate - by means of three different statistical tests - that ranks derived from random texts and ranks derived from real texts are statistically inconsistent with the parameters employed to argue for such a good fit, even when the parameters are inferred from the target real text. Our findings are valid for both the simplest random texts composed of equally likely characters as well as more elaborate and realistic versions where character probabilities are borrowed from a real text. Conclusions/Significance The good fit of random texts to real Zipf's law-like rank distributions has not yet been established. Therefore, we suggest that Zipf's law might in fact be a fundamental law in natural languages.
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              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 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.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: Funding acquisitionRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: ResourcesRole: SoftwareRole: SupervisionRole: ValidationRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: SoftwareRole: ValidationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: SupervisionRole: Validation
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS One
                plos
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                27 January 2022
                2022
                : 17
                : 1
                : e0260948
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Department of General Linguistics, Palacký University in Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic
                [2 ] Department of Psychology, Palacký University in Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic
                University of Sao Paulo, BRAZIL
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4111-7382
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4094-0502
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5489-7907
                Article
                PONE-D-21-10672
                10.1371/journal.pone.0260948
                8794160
                35085266
                6b7185b2-248e-4edf-a72a-b78273e1db64
                © 2022 Matlach et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 3 April 2021
                : 21 November 2021
                Page count
                Figures: 8, Tables: 5, Pages: 26
                Funding
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001823, Ministerstvo Školství, Mládeže a Tělovýchovy;
                Award ID: IGA_FF_2021_046
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001823, Ministerstvo Školství, Mládeže a Tělovýchovy;
                Award ID: IGA_FF_2021_046
                Award Recipient :
                Vladimír Matlach and Barbora Anna Janečková were funded by grant "Digital Humanities – theory and applications" No. "IGA_FF_2021_046, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, msmt.cz. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Daniel Dostál received no specific funding for this work.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Engineering and Technology
                Signal Processing
                Autocorrelation
                Research and Analysis Methods
                Mathematical and Statistical Techniques
                Statistical Methods
                Autocorrelation
                Physical Sciences
                Mathematics
                Statistics
                Statistical Methods
                Autocorrelation
                Social Sciences
                Linguistics
                Languages
                Natural Language
                Computer and Information Sciences
                Cryptography
                Encryption
                Physical Sciences
                Mathematics
                Cryptography
                Encryption
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Molecular Biology
                Molecular Biology Techniques
                Molecular Biology Assays and Analysis Techniques
                Ligation Assay
                Research and Analysis Methods
                Molecular Biology Techniques
                Molecular Biology Assays and Analysis Techniques
                Ligation Assay
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Habits
                Social Sciences
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                Computer and Information Sciences
                Software Engineering
                Computer Software
                Engineering and Technology
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                Preprocessing
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                Custom metadata
                First group of natural language samples of sufficient length are available at Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org), the other natural language sampels are available at institutional sites (such as national library mlp.cz), the direct links are as follows: Czech – Jaroslav Hašek: Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války, online: https://web2.mlp.cz/koweb/00/03/37/00/55/svejk_1_a_2.txt. English – George Orwell: Nineteen eighty-four, online: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt. Greek – Grazia Deledda, translated by Christos Alexandridis: Canne al vento, online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28658/28658-0.txt. Greek (Homer) – Homer, translated by Alexandros Pallis: Illiad, online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36248/old/20110529-36248-0.txt Chinese: Ru Zhen Li: Jin Hua Yuan, online: http://archive.org/stream/pgcommunitytexts23818gut/23818-0.txt. Italian – Gerolamo Rovetta titulek: Mater dolorosa, online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28910/28910-8.txt. Italian (Calabrian: Neapolitan) – Giovanni Battista Guarini, translated by Domenico Basile: Il pastor fido in lingua napolitana, online: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17835/17835-0.txt. Latin -- Caius Silius Italicus: Punicorum Libri Septemdecim, online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27219/27219-0.txt Latin (Virgil) – Virgil: The Aeneid, online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/227/227.txt. Polish – Edward Lasker, translated by Wojciech Ozimiński: Szachy i Warcaby: Droga do mistrzostwa, online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15201/15201-8.txt. Russian – Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace, online: http://tolstoy.ru/creativity/fiction/1071/. Sanskrit: Rigveda, Mandala, online: https://sanskritdocuments.org/mirrors/rigveda/sanskrit03/RV0301noaccent.html. The other languages were represented by the Bibles including both the Old and New Testaments, available from: bible.com. The Voynich manuscript transliteration is downloadable from: http://voynich.freie-literatur.de/index.php?show=extractor and the cleaned and artificially generated texts are downloadable from: http://kol.ff.upol.cz/voynich_data/.

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