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Nature Is Weird  /  Society

The Voynich manuscript contains two distinct writing styles that a mathematical model can identify with 89 percent accuracy.

A Beta-Binomial mixture model confirmed the existence of two structural languages known as the Currier A and B split. This mysterious book has puzzled cryptographers for centuries with its undecipherable text and strange illustrations. Many scholars thought the manuscript was a single unified work or perhaps a meaningless hoax. The statistical evidence proves that at least two different authors or systems were used to create the text. This finding provides a concrete foundation for future attempts to finally decode what the manuscript actually says.

Original Paper

A Quantitative Confirmation of the Currier Language Distinction

Christophe Parisel

arXiv  ·  2604.25979

We present a quantitative analysis of character-pair substitution ratios in the Voynich manuscript, testing whether Currier's A/B language distinction (1976) reflects a genuine structural property of the text. A Beta-Binomial mixture model applied to raw character counts without access to labels recovers the Currier split with ARI = 0.383. A supervised Beta-Binomial classifier trained on a subset of folios predicts the A/B identity of held-out folios at 89.2% accuracy. The character pairs separa