The Translation of The Voynich Manuscript: Folio 1r

[MarcoP]

This is based on something I posted on Reddit. The first version of the paper was clearer and offered a line-by-line Latin word salad, while in later versions the correspondence with Voynich lines was lost. That earlier version makes it easier to notice that the pseudo-Latin is twice longer than Voynichese (even using EVA) and includes more words. There is no clear correspondence between Voynichese words and Latin words (see highlighted examples, e.g. "horas" occurs three times in the fist two lines, but no Voynichese word occurs three times).

   


A possible way to simulate the encoding is removing half the characters and one fourth of the spaces from a plain text, but this of course increases entropy, while Scott's pseudo-Latin has a higher entropy than Voynichese.

Examples:

she seems to hang upon the cheek of night
seem t hn uote he o ngt

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
teuc bon o jmsvr h lz dg

in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth
ite einn gd raete evn n teat

Bowern and Lindemann have shown that also historical abbreviations in actual manuscripts result in higher entropy (which makes sense, since the goal is encoding the same amount of information in a shorter text).

_______

EDIT: Truncation could be a better approximation of Scott's method (it doesn't increase entropy, maybe it even lowers it somehow). Still removing one fourth of the spaces:

she seems to hang upon the cheek of night
shse to ha upth ch of ni

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
thqu br fo juov th la do

in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth
inth begi go creth he an thea