An explanation of the Voynich Manuscript text

[-JKP-]

Repeated sequences can be explained in a number of ways. Some of the more obvious ones have been mentioned on the forum and on blogs (poetry, emphasis, exaggeration, etc.).

But repeated sequences can also be explained by manipulation of spaces, and I haven't seen this discussed at any length... most of the statistical and linguistic studies of the VMS retain the spaces, so consider this:

     Many a man manipulates a management assessment.
     Man ya man man ipula tesa man age men tass ess ment.


First, note that similarity to Voynichese is increased in the second example, without shuffling a single letter.

Then note that in the second example, not only does "man" occur three times in a short space, but tokens like "ment", will likely occur frequently in any manuscript because they are common suffixes. Also note that the consonant-vowel balance changes, with twice as many vowels at the end if words are broken this way.


This may be an extreme example (although poetry often has these properties), but it should be enough to illustrate that there may be a rule set that breaks words at specific points to put certain glyphs at the beginning and, to balance it (since it's hard to manipulate both the beginnings and ends of short words at the same time), nulls at the ends (the ends of Vwords are repetitious in the extreme with an unusually high number of EVA-y).


I'm not arguing that Voynichese is natural language split into pieces. It's possible, but the text is too rule-based and constrained for it to seem likely, but I do think that statistical modeling and breakdowns will have to consider that spaces may be selectively chosen (or be a result of the glyph selection process), thus resulting in certain patterns that seem repetitious for reasons other than their actual method of construction.