Mystery script could be secret language

• Autores: Lisa Grossman
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2923, 2013, págs. 8-9
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • A beautiful but controversial 15th-century text looks less like a hoax. The first analysis to quantify the likely information content of the 500-year-old Voynich manuscript suggests it is a secret language or code, not gibberish. As well as adding weight to one side of a heated debate, the result showcases a method that could be applied more broadly in future, to extract meaning from genomes, detect messages from aliens or interpret signals in the brain. Now Marcelo Montemurro of the University of Manchester in the UK and colleagues have analyzed the text using a technique that looks for word relationships that signify meaning. Montemurro's team had already used the entropy approach in 2009 to home in on meaningful words in famous texts.