An analysis of the relationship between words within the Voynich manuscript

Abstract

This paper investigates the presence of linguistic structure within the Voynich Manuscript by analysing various properties of word-pairs found in the manuscript as well as in other works written in natural languages. Apart from the Voynich, the other manuscripts we analysed are the Bible, Dante’s La Divina Commedia, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Julius Caesar. The order of words in the word-pairs in these manuscripts is analyzed and this analysis indicated that several pairs were more likely to appear in one order than the other. These are called ’skewed pairs’. The ratio of the number of skewed pairs in each work is to the number of all pairs in each work is plotted, along with this same ratio but for random shuffles of each work. The results indicated that there is a substantial difference in all natural language documents between their normal and shuffled counterparts. The difference is not as large within the Voynich Manuscript but the word-pair occurrence ratio of the original is still considerably higher than the ratio of the shuffled manuscript. This could indicate that the Voynich Manuscript is not random text but may be a language or a cipher.