Ungrammatical repetition of the same few words

[punainerkarhu]

I thought of this after seeing a theory mentioned in one of Voynich Talk's videos that each glyph could be a word and if we try substituting them with some words in English or any other language we'll get same few words repeating again and again. 

But what if the author/s of the manuscript generated the text by repeating the same words (throwing in a few more rare words here and there) over and over again with no grammar just substituting the letters/sounds in their native language with new glyphs they invented? Basically simple substitution just no real meaning behind the text. 

Personally I don't think that's the case but could be worth considering as it might explain some properties of the manuscript, and I wanted to check if a similar idea was discussed before and whether someone tried mapping Voynich words to existing languages to see if some substitutions provide consistent results.

[Koen G]

I think I understand what you mean. So it would be like a nonsense generating method, but the scribes would have actual words from their language in mind while writing?

The problem there is that to get something as restricted as Voynichese, those words would have to be selected and planned very carefully. And then they would also include minor variations of these words to get things like [dain, daiin] etc. 

So if I understand correctly, what you're asking, it's basically whether the makers had real words in mind while they were generating the text. Within a hypothetical framework of a meaningless text, I think it's almost unavoidable that the writers attached some phonetic values to the words, kind of like we do with EVA. But this is impossible to prove, or even test, I think.

[punainerkarhu]

Yes that’s what I meant, they were writing words in whatever language they spoke and used invented alphabet instead of the normal script for that language, so something like:


STONE CAT LAKE GREEN WATER HOUSE ROAD ROAD ROAD FIELD LAKE GOD CAT IN WATER WINDOW HOUSE GREEN STONE LAKE ROAD CAT WATER FIELD GOD IN AN LAKE HOUSE HOUSE TREE HOUSE GREEN WATER CAT SMALL ROAD LAKE

WATER LAKE HOUSE CAT GREEN STONE GOD FIELD ROAD WATER CAT LAKE HOUSE GREEN WATER STONE ROAD GOD CAT FIELD LAKE WINDOW WATER HOUSE HOUSE CAT GREEN LAKE ROAD STONE WATER GOD ……


just wrote it in a new script. The only purpose of doing that that I could think of is to make a resemblance of a mysterious text that isn’t meant to be read or understood. And for that purpose it’s probably easier and faster to just think of meaningful sentences or copy phrases from existing books. They would also complicate things for themselves by starting or ending lines/paragraphs with specific words and doing other deliberate things for seemingly no reason other than aesthetics maybe.

So I guess I wanted to ask if anybody tried using some software to assign glyphs to various Latin (or other alphabet) letters and check if the resulting words would exist in one of the natural languages or whether such a test is possible in practice. Or maybe we can just rule out simple substitution based on the structure and specific properties of voynich words alone even if we assume that the text isn’t natural speech but rather random selection of words. I think you already addressed my questions well by pointing out variations like [dain, daiin] which is a deviation from simple substitution.

[RadioFM]

Likely unfalsifiable. Self-citation and similar methods on the other hand fit better the amount of hapax legomena and edit distance between neighboring words.

Because Voynichese's usually constrained morphology, if it were phonetical it'd look like this IMO

HOUSE ROAD ROAD ROAD FIELD LAKE GOD CAT IN WATER WINDOW HOUSE GREEN STONE LAKE ROAD CAT WATER FIELD GOD IN AN LAKE HOUSE HOUSE TREE HOUSE GREEN WATER CAT SMALL ROAD LAKE

--------->

CHOUSE BROAD ROAE BROAD FILEX
BLAKE GOD COT IN IM WATE IN WIND
BHOUSE GREE STONE CTO ELAKE ROADE
DCAT WATER WAOD WGOD IN AN LAKE BHOUD AN IN GOE GAN AN HOUDX
LBREPEN AM CAT AN IMAD ROAD GOADX