An explanation of the Voynich Manuscript text

[ReneZ]

Let me add that I don't reject the possibility that the text is meaningless. I consider it possible, and there are some arguments in favour of it.

However, the simulations shown here do not demonstrate this. Let me try to explain why, by using a thought experiment. (This could actually be done in practice).

Take some known text, why not 'Don Quixote'. This is certainly a meaningful text.

Sort all words in descending frequency of occurrence. This produces a list.

Put next to this a list of all words in the Voynich MS, equally sorted in order of descending frequency.


Using the resulting table of word pairs as a translation table, translate Don Quixote word for word into Voynichese. This results in a text using 100% real Voynichese words, but that is is meaningful.

Now shuffle all the words in Don Quixote around. (This is easily done with a computer. With paper and a pair of scissors would take a considerable amount of time.)
The resulting text is certainly meaningless.

Again translate this into Voynichese using the same table as before.

The two texts in Voynichese that we obtained are looking extremely similar. Nobody would be able to tell whether one or the other is meaningful or not.
Both have exactly the same word length distribution and their 'Zipf graphs' are identical.

As a side note: neither of them would have the properties of Eva-f, p and m mentioned in my earlier post.

Anyway, it is clear that 'meaning' is defined by the order of words, not the 'method' how words are created.

An interesting test would be to check for repeating word sequences. This can be predicted with statistics, in principle, but also checked using software that some people have already available.