[split] The Zipf law and the Voynich Manuscript

[Sam G]

The interesting part is not that the main text follows Zipf law, but that the main text does while the labels do not.

This means that not the same process was followed for generating or writing the main text and for the labels.

This is simply not correct.

What we see in the VMS is actually perfectly normal for a meaningful text.  If you have a book containing a main body of text along with illustrations that contain labels, then:

1) The words in the main text will obey Zipf's law

2) The words in the labels will not obey Zipf's law

Which of course is what we see in the VMS.

So from the standpoint that the VMS is a meaningful text, there is nothing unusual to account for at all, and certainly no need to postulate a separate process for creating the labels.

Actually, proposing that the labels were created using a separate process is problematic, because it would seem to require that whoever created the text understood that the frequency distributions of words should be different in the main text and in the labels, and that the creator consciously sought to emulate these properties.  Either that or it would have to be some extremely unlikely coincidence that two processes were used and that they just so happened to reproduce these features.

This is in addition to the point that the words in the labels have the same structure as words in the main text, and some words occur in both the labels and the main text, etc.  All the available evidence indicates that the words in the labels and the main text are part of the same language or system.