Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

The Voynich manuscript has remained so far as a mystery for linguists and cryptologists. While the text written on medieval parchment -using an unknown script system- shows basic statistical patterns that bear resemblance to those from real languages, there are features that suggested to some researches that the manuscript was a forgery intended as a hoax. Here we analyse the long-range structure of the manuscript using methods from information theory. We show that the Voynich manuscript presents a complex organization in the distribution of words that is compatible with those found in real language sequences. We are also able to extract some of the most significant semantic word-networks in the text. These results together with some previously known statistical features of the Voynich manuscript, give support to the presence of a genuine message inside the book.迄今为止，伏尼契手稿（Voynich manuscript）始终是语言学家与密码学界悬而未决的谜团。尽管这份以未知书写体系誊写于中世纪羊皮纸之上的文本，展现出与真实语言相仿的基础统计特征，但部分研究者依据其部分特征推断，该手稿实为一场蓄意伪造的恶作剧赝品。本研究借助信息论相关方法，对该手稿的长程结构展开分析。研究结果表明，伏尼契手稿的词汇分布具备复杂的组织架构，与真实语言序列中的词汇分布特征相符。此外，本研究还从文本中提取出若干最为关键的语义词汇网络。上述研究结果结合此前已被发现的伏尼契手稿的多项统计特征，为该手稿内部蕴含真实可读信息这一观点提供了支撑。