[Interview] Can statistics help crack the mysterious Voynich manuscript?

[lurker]

Can statistics help crack the mysterious Voynich manuscript?
Q & A with Claire Bowern

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Bowern created and taught an undergraduate class to explore the possibilities, which she and post-doctoral researcher Luke Lindemann describe in a recent paper in the Annual Review of Linguistics. She spoke with Knowable about some of their insights. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

[LisaFaginDavis]

Great interview!

[bi3mw]

One thing we’ve just started working on is exploring what type of encipherment methods give the sort of odd character distributions — the low h2 — we see in Voynichese. We have a corpus of text from Wikipedia and an ancient language corpus of digitized materials from medieval and historical texts, and we can apply different cipher methods to these texts and see if the result matches the statistical properties of Voynichese.

I would have been interested to know which encryption methods could be considered. Newer methods would have to be excluded in principle, and the possibilities for methods at the beginning of the 15th century are quite limited.

[nickpelling]

The one corpus nobody has is of 15th century scribal abbreviations (no, not Tironian notae, or what remained of them in use circa 1400-1450).

[LisaFaginDavis]

Cappelli is a pretty complete list of abbreviations, including 15th c.

[Aga Tentakulus]

Example Cappelli at the University of Zurich.
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[nickpelling]

Cappelli is a pretty complete list of abbreviations, including 15th c.

That's brevigraphs, not abbreviation. Mid-15th century scribal abbreviation styles for tachygraphic note-taking were completely different, the Tironian notae hangovers became used less and less as the century developed.

Xri dmi etc are what I'm talking about.

[Helmut Winkler]

Nick,

instead of wasting money on some out of the way publications, you should buy yourself one of the basic texts like Bishoff or Derolez and study them thoroughly

[nickpelling]

I have both, thanks, and have studied both thoroughly.

[LisaFaginDavis]

Nick, xpi dni et al. are considered abbreviations. (I'm sure you know this, but for others reading this it's XPI for Christus, not XRI - the X is Greek [chi] and the P is Greek [rho] - and DNI not DMI for [domini]). The nomina sacra are abbreviations for the complete words Christus Dominus Jhesus Christus in all of their Latin forms. Even the Tironian [et] in common use in the fifteenth century would be considered an abbreviation, not a shorthand symbol, since the distinction had been lost for most scribes by that time.

At any rate, Cappelli is not going to be useful for VMS because, in spite of what others have argued, VMS glyphs are definitely not medieval abbreviations or any known system of shorthand.