A Proposed Mapping of the Voynich Alphabet to an Indo-European Language By Robert A Downing II, Ojasw Upadhyay, Riya Bhatia, and Abhay Harpalani

https://www.academia.edu/44018083/A_Proposed_Mapping_of_the_Voynich_Alphabet_to_an_Indo_European_Language?rhid=39731744604&swp=rr-rw-wc-59376525&nav_from=1f4f43f4-baf4-4f28-b518-39c0d28b7d80 Folios 1v-6r of the Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious codex that was written in an unknown language during the 15th or 16th century, contains various illustrations of plants, and these diagrams offer valuable clues about the text and its meaning (1). The labels associated with these diagrams were roughly translated to various derivatives of Proto-Indo-European languages (Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese). This was done using a frequency-based character map where the most common characters in Voynichese were mapped to the most frequent characters in the target language. The translated text was manually checked to identify words with possible meaning in a target language, and the meanings of those words were cross-referenced with Dr. Gerard Cheshire's work to identify which words were false positives and which were likely correct translations. Our mapping helps validate Dr. Cheshire's research on the plants described in the first ten folios of the Voynich Manuscript and provides further insight into the information contained in those folios (2). Since the Voynich Manuscript is over six hundred years old and may possess information that reveals novel remedies to common diseases and plants that were previously undiscovered, it can provide meaningful information that could alter the field of medicine. Also, because of the use of Vulgar Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire, the text may give clues about this purely spoken language. Voynich Manuscript | MS 408 | Romance Languages | Medieval Plants | Natural Language Processing | Latin ...