Given the bizarreness of the manuscript, it is a good idea–as Knight points out–to adjust our perception by comparing it to contemporary or newer codices, see Fig 1 for some examples doing so, the Voynich manuscript loses a bit of its mystique. Even though the place of origin of the manuscript and its earliest whereabouts are not known, thanks to the carbon-dating method, an approximate date of its creation has been established: 1404–1438 (more details in ). Based on a letter which was folded into the manuscript, we can trace back its history to the turn of the 16 th and 17 th centuries’ Prague, where it was in possession of emperor Rudolph II, who was well-known for his interest in alchemy and occult matters. It is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a bookseller who found the manuscript in Italy in 1912. The history of the manuscript is quite uncertain. This one treats the manuscript as an elaborate historical cipher, which has not yet been decrypted some encryption methods have been proposed. The last, third, dominant assumption is the ciphertext theory. From the history of the manuscript, we learn that it was bought by emperor Rudolph II for a large sum of money. The second dominant theory is that the manuscript is a hoax–an elaborate forgery made with the vision of monetary gain. , and is usually based on the comparison of the manuscript to other historical codices. This conclusion has been made by multiple scholars, e.g. The first of them is the claim that it is a plaintext of a natural language. So far, the research of the manuscript has revolved around three dominant theories about the nature of the text. While some characters are simple and could be written by a simple stroke, several are more complicated–those are conventionally called gallows. The writing system uses various characters, whose count has not yet been established but varies in a range from 23 to 40. The text is well structured as can be observed from the combinatorics of the characters and the words. Overall, the manuscript contains 37,919 words (with 8,114 word types) separated by whitespace the body of the text is left-aligned. The text of the manuscript is hand-written and extends throughout the whole work. The Voynich manuscript is a historic document, which comprises 102 folios organized into 20 quires, each containing a certain amount of hand-written text of an unknown writing system and illustrations of a seemingly bizarre nature. Daniel Dostál received no specific funding for this work.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. 'IGA_FF_2021_046, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports,. įunding: Vladimír Matlach and Barbora Anna Janečková were funded by grant 'Digital Humanities – theory and applications' No. The Voynich manuscript transliteration is downloadable from: and the cleaned and artificially generated texts are downloadable from. The other languages were represented by the Bibles including both the Old and New Testaments, available from:. Russian – Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace, online. Polish – Edward Lasker, translated by Wojciech Ozimiński: Szachy i Warcaby: Droga do mistrzostwa, online.

Latin - Caius Silius Italicus: Punicorum Libri Septemdecim, online: Latin (Virgil) – Virgil: The Aeneid, online. Italian (Calabrian: Neapolitan) – Giovanni Battista Guarini, translated by Domenico Basile: Il pastor fido in lingua napolitana, online. Italian – Gerolamo Rovetta titulek: Mater dolorosa, online. Greek (Homer) – Homer, translated by Alexandros Pallis: Illiad, online: Chinese: Ru Zhen Li: Jin Hua Yuan, online. Greek – Grazia Deledda, translated by Christos Alexandridis: Canne al vento, online. English – George Orwell: Nineteen eighty-four, online.

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.ĭata Availability: First group of natural language samples of sufficient length are available at Project Gutenberg (), 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. Received: ApAccepted: NovemPublished: January 27, 2022Ĭopyright: © 2022 Matlach et al. PLoS ONE 17(1):Įditor: Diego Raphael Amancio, University of Sao Paulo, BRAZIL Citation: Matlach V, Janečková BA, Dostál D (2022) The Voynich manuscript: Symbol roles revisited.

Decoded voynich manuscript