![]() ![]() Medievalist Damian Fleming of Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne was among those who responded to news of the work in frustration on social media, specifically critiquing the decision to use Google Translate to decipher the manuscript rather than consult a Hebrew scholar. "Somebody with very good knowledge of Hebrew and who’s a historian at the same time could take this evidence and follow this kind of clue,” Kondrak tells Weber.īut Voynich scholars are skeptical. Weber reports that a translation of another 72-word section included the words "farmer," "light," "air" and "fire." After the team fixed some funky spelling errors and ran it through Google Translate, they came up with something readable, even if it doesn’t make much sense: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.” He said it didn’t form a coherent sentence. Neither of the researchers are schooled in ancient Hebrew, so George Dvorsky at Gizmodo reports they took their deciphered first line to computer scientist Moshe Koppel, a colleague and native Hebrew speaker. The research appears in the journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics. When they unscrambled the first line of text using that method they found that 80 percent of the words created were found in the Hebrew dictionary. T hey then hypothesized that the words were alphagrams, in which the letters are shuffled and vowels are dropped. But after feeding it to an AI trained to recognize 380 languages with 97 percent accuracy, its analysis of the letter frequency suggested the text was likely written in Hebrew. According to a press release, the team originally believed that the manuscript was written in Arabic. The latest to give it a stab? The Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Alberta.īob Weber at the Canadian Press reports that natural language processing expert Greg Kondrak and grad student Bradley Hauer have attempted to identify the language the manuscript was written in using AI. But that hasn't stopped people from trying. Despite numerous attempts to crack the code by some of the world’s best cryptographers, including Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park team, the contents of the enigmatic book have long remained a mystery. On top of that, the text itself is likely to have been scrambled by an unknown code. The handwritten, 240-page screed, now housed in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, is written from left to right in an unknown language. The Voynich Manuscript has baffled cryptographers ever since the early 15th-century document was rediscovered by a Polish book dealer in 1912. ![]()
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