The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript

Abstract

The Voynich Manuscript is a fifteenth-century illustrated cipher manuscript. In this overview of recent approaches to the Voynich Manuscript, we summarize and evaluate current work on the language that underlies this document. We provide arguments for treating the document as natural language (rather than a medieval hoax) and show how statistical arguments can be made about the phonology, morphology, and structure of the document even though the contents remain undecipherable.