Hello everyone,
while working on the idea of my You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. I tried a small exercise. Imagine that the Voynich is a positional substitution cipher, where each position in a word is encoded independently.
What I did was to take the Voynich tokens in EVA transliteration, look at them position by position, and record the distribution of characters. But I deliberately ignored
which character it was. In other words: at position 1 we might have 40% of one character, 30% of another, 20% of a third, and so on. Just the
shape of the distribution, not the labels.
Then I repeated the same procedure for several different languages. My working assumption is that if the corpora are large enough, the positional distributions should be similar within texts of the same language. Here is the result I got from the texts I currently have available:
| Corpus | Distance | Tokens |
|---|
| Alchemical herbal (Latin) | 0.327 | 6,536 |
| De Docta Ignorantia (Latin) | 0.374 | 37,121 |
| Tirant lo Blanc (Catalan) | 0.395 | 419,309 |
| La Reine Margot (French) | 0.396 | 112,803 |
| Ambrosius Medionalensis (Latin) | 0.402 | 117,734 |
| El Lazarillo de Tormes (Spanish) | 0.403 | 20,060 |
| Simplicius Simplicissimus (German) | 0.415 | 189,804 |
| Romeo and Juliet (English) | 0.451 | 24,822 |
| The English Physician (Culpepper) (English) | 0.460 | 135,362 |
So what does this mean? In this experiment the texts that came out closest to the Voynich were in
Latin (especially the “Alchemical herbal” and “De Docta Ignorantia”), followed by Catalan, French, and Spanish. German and English were clearly further away.
Of course this does not prove the language of the Voynich, but it is interesting that the nearest matches are all Romance or Latin texts, and the Germanic ones sit lower down the ranking. It suggests that, at least under this positional-distribution approach, the Voynich behaves more like Romance/Latin than like Germanic languages.
Note: I used the "Alchemical herbal" transliteration from Marco Ponzi and the german Simplicius Simplicissimus version of Jorge Stolfi.