Mysterious 15th Century Manuscript

Dated to the 15th century, the Voynich manuscript is a hand-written text in an unknown script, (17)_____ . Since its discovery in the 19th century, many historians and cryptographers, including code breakers during the Second World War, have attempted to work out its meaning but (18)_____ .

Now, computer scientists at the University of Alberta have applied artificial intelligence to the manuscript, with their first goal to establish its language of origin. They used the text from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 380 languages to “train” their system and then ran their algorithms, which determined (19)_____ .

Professor Kondrak, who led the research, and his graduate student Bradley Hauer were able to decipher a relatively high number of words using Hebrew as their reference language. “It turned out that over 80 per cent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but we didn't know (20)_____ , said Professor Kondrak.

The scientists then used Google Translate (21)_____ , Which read: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.” “It’s a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript but it definitely makes sense,’ said Professor Kondrak.

The results of this work were published in the journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics. While fully comprehending the text will require collaboration with historians of ancient Hebrew, Professor Kondrak has great faith in the ability of computers (22)_____ and said he is looking forward to applying his techniques to other ancient scripts.