Mysterious Voynich book may hold 'genuine message'

The world's most mysterious medieval manuscript, which dates back to the early 1400s, may actually hold a genuine message, a new study has claimed.
The message inside the so-called Voynich book has eluded cryptographers, mathematicians and linguists for over a century. And for many, the book is assumed to be a hoax.
However, a new study, published in the journal Plos One, suggests the manuscript may, after all, hold a genuine message, BBC News reported.
Scientists claim to have found linguistic patterns they believe to be meaningful words within the text.
The book has been dated to the early 1400s, but it largely disappeared from public record until 1912 when an antique book dealer called Wilfrid Voynich bought it amongst a number of second-hand publications in Italy.

The book is 240 pages long, is written in an unknown alphabet and features mysterious pictures of unknown plants, astronomical images and naked women bathing.

Marcelo Montemurro, a theoretical physicist from the University of Manchester, UK, believes his new research is one step closer to unravelling the mystery.
"The text is unique, there are no similar works and all attempts to decode any possible message in the text have failed. It's not easy to dismiss the manuscript as simple nonsensical gibberish, as it shows a significant [linguistic] structure," he told the BBC.
Montemurro and a colleague used a computerised statistical method to analyse the text, an approach that has been known to work on other languages. They focused on patterns of how the words were arranged in order to extract meaningful content-bearing words.

"There is substantial evidence that content-bearing words tend to occur in a clustered pattern, where they are required as part of the specific information being written," he said.
"Over long spans of texts, words leave a statistical signature about their use. When the topic shifts, other words are needed.
"The semantic networks we obtained clearly show that related words tend to share structure similarities. This also happens to a certain degree in real languages," he said.
Montemurro believes it unlikely that these features were simply "incorporated" into the text to make a hoax more realistic, as most of the required academic knowledge of these structures did not exist at the time the Voynich manuscript was created.

Though he has found a pattern, what the words mean still remains a mystery.
"After this study, any new support for the hoax hypothesis should address the emergence of this sophisticated structure explicitly. So far, this has not been done. There must be a story behind it, which we may never know," Montemurro said.