The Voynich Ninja

(24-01-2026, 01:51 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are two possibilities -the text is meaningful or the text is gibberish. Let's look at both of them:

1) Meaningful text
... For me  it is safe to assume that the scribes were not fluent with Voynichese and hadn't written a lot of texts in it before.

I agree.  We can see that they made certain mistakes that they would not have made if they understood the text.  Like mistaking a paragraph that jumps over a plant for a text in two columns, one on each side of the plant. 

Quote:2) Gibberish
There are actually different kinds of gibberish. To make it simple lets say there is random gibberish and structured gibberish. If Voynichese is gibberish then it is structured gibberish and not random gibberish.
Random gibberish appears for example during glossolalia. When people are doing it spontaneously ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ) then their talking are just loose words, they don't make patterns.
Writing gibberish without any preparation would give the same effect as glossolalia - stream of words not having any structure, most of them unique and not following Zipf law.
And Voynichese is systematic. If it is meaningless then it was created with some system (allowing some improvisation however).

Agreed!  And that is one of the reasons why I cannot believe any "gibberish" claim.  

I cannot see why the Author would invent a complicated random text generator that could generate the structures we see, and satisfy Zipf's law, and have the right amount of entropy, etc. etc.. 

To fool some stupid Emperor and his cryptographers?  They would not know about Zipf's law etc, and even if they did, they would not expect an encrypted text to have any of those properties.  

To make it look like a natural but unknown language, like Kelley's Enochian?  There were many   methods which would be a lot easier to execute, and would produce text that would look a lot more like language, than a complicated gibberish-generating algorithm...

All the best, --stolfi

One example of a personal and unknown language is with singer Lisa Gerrard.
She often performs with her own words.
And it does not sound gibberish, for me.

But if the VM is not gibberisch and the one and only piece ever done.
How valuable must the content be to invest such effort.

Some examples of Lisa can be found here
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
or here with Dead Can Dance [ :-) ]
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(24-01-2026, 07:55 PM)wojnitsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One example of a personal and unknown language is with singer Lisa Gerrard.
She often performs with her own words.
And it does not sound gibberish, for me.

But if the VM is not gibberisch and the one and only piece ever done.
How valuable must the content be to invest such effort.

Some examples of Lisa can be found here
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
or here with Dead Can Dance [ :-) ]
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Sigur Ros is another example, they sing in Hopelandic which is a created musical Icelandic language.

In terms of the VMS my understanding is the script is a fully established language, not just personal language, with established links to many other languages “capable of cluster”