Open AccessThe Voynich manuscript: Symbol roles revisited
Author(s) -
Vladimír Matlach,
Barbora Anna Janečková,
Daniel Dostál
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0260948
Subject(s) - symbol (formal) , alphabet , simple (philosophy) , computer science , steganography , encoding (memory) , order (exchange) , arithmetic , theoretical computer science , natural language processing , combinatorics , artificial intelligence , mathematics , linguistics , embedding , programming language , epistemology , philosophy , finance , economics
In this article, we employ simple descriptive methods in order to explore the peculiar behavior of the symbols in the Voynich Manuscript. Such an analysis reveals a group of symbols which are further analyzed for the possibility of being compounds (or ligatures), using a specifically developed method. The results suggest the possibility that the alphabet of the manuscript is a lot smaller, and steganographic type of encoding is proposed to explain the newly revealed properties.