Editing Voynich manuscript (section)

=== Hoax ===
[[File:Voynich Manuscript (175).jpg|thumb|upright|Page 175; ''f99r'', of the pharmaceutical section]]
[[File:Voynich Manuscript (135).jpg|thumb|upright|Page 135; ''f75r'', from the balneological section showing apparent [[nymphs]]]]

The fact that the manuscript has defied decipherment thus far has led various scholars to propose that the text does not contain meaningful content in the first place, implying that it may be a medieval [[hoax]].

In 2003, computer scientist [[Gordon Rugg]] showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay.<ref>{{cite web |title=Replicating the Voynich Manuscript |publisher=Keele |location=UK |url=http://www.scm.keele.ac.uk/staff/g_rugg/voynich/ |first=Gordon |last=Rugg |access-date=8 June 2016|archive-date=23 August 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160823155350/http://www.scm.keele.ac.uk/staff/g_rugg/voynich/}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last=McKie |first=Robin |date=25 January 2004 |title=Secret of historic code: It's gibberish |newspaper=[[The Observer]] |location=UK |url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/jan/25/arts.highereducation |access-date=8 June 2016|archive-date=23 April 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160423183508/http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/jan/25/arts.highereducation |url-status=live}}</ref> The latter device, known as a [[Cardan grille]], was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, more than 100&nbsp;years after the estimated creation date of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that the similarity between the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments and the Voynich manuscript is superficial, and the grille method could be used to emulate any language to a certain degree.<ref>{{cite magazine |last=D'Agnese |first=Joseph |date=September 2004 |title=Scientific Method Man |magazine=Wired |url=http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/rugg.html?pg=1 |access-date=8 June 2016|archive-date=11 November 2006|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061111224306/http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/rugg.html |url-status=live}}</ref>

In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner published in ''[[Cryptologia]]'' supported the hoax hypothesis.{{sfn|Schinner|2007}} Schinner posited that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced using a quasi-[[stochastic]] method, such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts.{{sfn|Schinner|2007}}

Some scholars have claimed that the manuscript's text appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. In 2013, Marcelo Montemurro, a theoretical physicist from the [[University of Manchester]], published findings claiming that [[semantic network]]s exist in the text of the manuscript, such as content-bearing words occurring in a clustered pattern, or new words being used when there was a shift in topic.<ref>{{harvnb|Montemurro|Zanette|2013|p=e66344}}</ref> With this evidence, he believes it unlikely that these features were intentionally "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 would have been written.<ref>{{cite news |last=Hogenboom |first=Melissa |date=22 June 2013 |title=Mysterious Voynich manuscript has 'genuine message' |website=BBC News |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22975809 |access-date=8 June 2016|archive-date=2 February 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200202095442/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22975809 |url-status=live}}</ref> In 2021, researchers at [[Yale University]], using the [[tf–idf]] analysis, further investigated the relation between clusters of subjects in the text and topics as they could be identified by illustrations and [[paleography]] analysis. Their conclusion is that clusters derived by computation match with the topics of the illustrations to some degree, thus providing evidence that the Voynich manuscript contains meaningful text.<ref>{{Cite arXiv |last1=Sterneck |first1=Rachel |last2=Polish |first2=Annie |last3=Bowern |first3=Claire |date=2021 |title=Topic Modeling in the Voynich Manuscript |class=cs.CL |eprint=2107.02858}}</ref>

However, other scholars have argued that such sophisticated patterns could also appear in hoaxed documents. In 2016, Gordon Rugg and Gavin Taylor published another article in ''[[Cryptologia]]'' demonstrating that the grille method could reproduce many larger-scale features of the text.<ref>{{cite journal |first1=Gordon |last1=Rugg |first2=Gavin |last2=Taylor |title=Hoaxing statistical features of the Voynich Manuscript |date=September 2016 |journal=Cryptologia |volume=41 |issue=3 |pages=247–268 |s2cid=5848113 |doi=10.1080/01611194.2016.1206753}}</ref> In 2019, Torsten Timm and Andreas Schinner published a paper arguing that the text was produced by a process of "self-citation" in which scribes copied and modified meaningless words from earlier in the text. Using a computer simulation of this process, they demonstrated that it could reproduce many of the statistical characteristics of the Voynich manuscript.<ref>{{cite journal |first1=Torsten |last1=Timm |first2=Andreas |last2=Schinner |title=A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript |date=May 2019 |journal=Cryptologia |volume=44 |issue=1 |pages=1–19 |s2cid=181797693 |doi=10.1080/01611194.2019.1596999}}</ref> In 2022, [[Yale University]] researchers Daniel Gaskell and Claire Bowern published the results of an experiment in which human participants intentionally tried to write meaningless text. They found that the resulting text was often highly non-random and exhibited many of the same unusual statistical properties as the Voynich manuscript, supporting the idea that some features of the text could have been produced in a hoax.<ref>{{cite journal |first1=Gaskell |last1=Daniel |first2=Bowern |last2=Claire |title=Gibberish after all? Voynichese is statistically similar to human-produced samples of meaningless text |date=2022 |journal=CEUR Workshop Proceedings |volume=3313 |url=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper4.pdf |access-date=10 January 2023 |archive-date=10 January 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230110035222/https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper4.pdf |url-status=live}}</ref>