(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)īusiness Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. The researchers are looking forward to applying the algorithms they developed to other ancient manuscripts.
Without historians of ancient Hebrew, Kondrak explained, the full meaning of the Voynich manuscript will remain a mystery. "'She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.' It is a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript but it definitely makes sense," he said. "It came up with a sentence that is grammatical, and you can interpret it," said Kondrak. "It turned out that over 80 per cent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but we did not know if they made sense together," said Kondrak.Īfter unsuccessfully seeking Hebrew scholars to validate their findings, the scientists turned to Google Translate. They tried to come up with an algorithm to decipher that type of scrambled text. Resaerchers hypothesised the manuscript was created using alphagrams, defining one phrase with another, exemplary of the ambiguities in human language. The next step is how do we decipher it," said Greg Kondrak, professor at University of Alberta. And just saying 'this is Hebrew' is the first step. They initially hypothesised that the Voynich manuscript was written in Arabic but after running their algorithms, it turned out that the most likely language was Hebrew. The team used samples of 400 different languages from the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" to systematically identify the language. Their first step was to address the language of origin, which is enciphered on hundreds of delicate vellum pages with accompanying illustrations.