An explanation of the Voynich Manuscript text

[Torsten]

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.

In the first case the word order of the original text is unchanged. Since repeated word sequences are typical for any language it is possible to find repeated sequences here. In the english variant of Don Quixote (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) it is for instance possible to find phrases like "if I had" (24 times), "if we had" (7 times), "it may be" (61 times), "what you say" (7 times) or "the same thing" (14 times).  By replacing words with different ones the word order remains unchanged. Since it is very unlikely to find shuffled variants like "thing the same" for phrases in a natural language the same would be true for the text using replaced words.

For the shuffled text repeated phrases only occur coincidentally. Therefore repeated phrases would be rare occur. Moreover each order for some words has the same chance. Therefore it is expected that repeated words will also occur in different word order. The existence of repeated phrases with a fix word order is therefore a feature that allows us to distinguish between both types of texts. That the order of words matters for the first text indicates that the words transports some meaning.

In the case of the VMS repeated phrases are rare [see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.]. Words used together multiply times also occur in different order. In this way the text of the VMS is similar to the text with shuffled words. But the chance that two words occur together multiple times is increased if the words are the same or similar to each other. See for instance phrases like [chedy qokeey qokeey], [qokeey qokeey chedy] and [qokeey chedy qokeey] [see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.]. Therefore the order of words in the VMS is not purely random. Another observation is that the word next to a word ending with [y] has a higher chance to start with [q]. It is also possible to predict to some extent the position within a paragraph or within a line for words starting or ending ending with with glyphs typical for this position. Even if a word did not depend on the previous words as expected for a natural language the words in the VMS depend to some extend on there context and on there position within a page or line. Therefore the text of the VMS is different to both types of text mentioned by Rene. There is no word order as expected for a text using natural language but the position of words is also not random.