[split] The Zipf law and the Voynich Manuscript

[Sam G]

Basically the labels don't obey Zipf's law.  Most of them only occur once.  But that's actually normal since lists and other kinds of data are known not to obey Zipf's law.

If you think about the labels in a visual dictionary, for instance, nearly all of them are only going to occur once.  I would guess that labels accompanying illustrations in scientific textbooks would have a similar distribution.

That the main text obeys Zipf's law and the labels do not is not going to be easy to explain if you think it's something other than a meaningful text.  Maybe someone in the early 15th century had already discovered Zipf's law and consciously created a nonsense text to emulate these properties?