A Generative Grammar Underlying the Voynich Manuscript, the Pastiche Hypothesis: Evidence from Large Language Models

Abstract:Background: The Voynich Manuscript is a fifteenth-century codex written in an unknown script whose content remains undeciphered. Previous studies suggest that its statistical properties resemble those of natural languages, while its illustrations - primarily plants - recall medieval herbals. Methods: We present a multidisciplinary analysis combining probabilistic modeling, phonetic decomposition, rare-event detection, and multimodal image analysis, based on a newly transliterated corpus. Word- and letter-level distributions are modeled using position-dependent probabilistic grammars, while phonetic patterns are compared across Indo-European, Semitic, and Asian languages. Image-text alignment methods based on large language models are applied to identify potential botanical correspondences. Results: The results indicate that Voynich symbols behave as letters rather than syllabic units, while word-length distributions resemble syllabic structures. Phonetic analyses show closer alignment with consonant-heavy languages such as Hebrew or Arabic than with Indo-European languages. Probabilistic modeling reproduces Zipf-like distributions and reveals extremely low probabilities for repeated initial-letter sequences, indicating a structured imitation of natural language. Image analysis suggests strong correspondences between Voynich plant illustrations and those found in Pseudo-Apuleius herbals from the Mediterranean tradition, consistent with an imitation of medieval medicinal books. Perspectives: These findings support the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript follows a structured generative system combining linguistic regularities and herbal knowledge, and demonstrate the value of integrating probabilistic and AI-assisted approaches in the analysis of historical manuscripts.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.20835 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.20835v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.20835 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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