This Website presents an edited version of a Master's paper submitted to the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Science.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina, April, 2001

Gregory B. Newby, Advisor

ABSTRACT

This study intended to answer a simple question: How does the elimination of gallows variants from the transcription set change the results of statistical queries on the Voynich manuscript?

It was hypothesized that the gallows variants in the Voynich manuscript alphabet are null characters, and that removing them would not have a statistically relevant impact on correlational power curves.

This study was designed to create samples that, despite various characters being completely removed, continued to strongly correlate with a machine-readable Voynich manuscript transcription file. It is possible that such correspondence would indicate the presence of null characters, whose removal did not affect the statistics of the modified text with any significance. Conversely, if the modified samples exhibit variation consistent with their rank and frequency within the manuscript, this is strong evidence that the characters are not null.

The actual analysis was a straightforward application of Spearman's rank correlation coefficient to nine separate data samples, along with the source text and two natural language control files written in vulgate Latin and Arabic, respectively.

The study demonstrated that the removal of gallows variants effected the statistical measures in ways inconsistent with null characters.

Headings:

• Voynich manuscript
• Text analysis
• Rank correlation
• Null characters
• Cryptography