An explanation of the Voynich Manuscript text

[DonaldFisk]

The y-qo pattern is only an example.

There might well be other final-initial glyph frequencies significantly above or below chance.   This is worth checking.   I can accommodate it by having a transition from final state to initial state.   This might make the Gamma distribution I observed for word pairs moot.

In his paper from 2012 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has for instance demonstrated three effects: 1. The first word in a line of a line is longer than average, 2. The second word is shorter, 3. Over the course of the line, the average word length drops. It is possible to name numerous other patterns for the VMS.

I'll have to examine the Vogt result in more depth.   It's harder for me to explain, and I don't have any ideas at present.   If there's anything else you think I'm unaware of, please let me know.

Sorry, but small changes for page clusters didn't explain the differences between individual pages. It is even possible to describe differences between the front and back side of a single sheet. Words common on one page can be rare on the next page. See for instance the differences I have described for the first three quires You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 

Different sides of the same folio often lie in different clusters, so different word frequencies isn't a problem.

I suggested solving this by a preprocessing step.

I meant postprocessing step.

You can simulate the words of the VMS with a state transition diagram. This is no surprise since it is always possible to build a state transition diagram for a given set of words. But this didn't mean that a state transition diagram is a effective method to generate a text if no computer is available. As far as I can see the process you describe is a more detailed variant of Gordon Ruggs approach. The problem is that much more effort is needed to make your method work. You have to role the dices for every glyph with probabilities depending on the previous glyphs. Moreover the probabilities must change over time. Gordon Rugg has simulated this with different tables you simulate it with different transition diagrams. But this is not enough since you both have to add additional steps to your methods to explain that the text corresponds to its container. In my eyes your method is not effective enough to generate a huge amount of text manually.

Generating text by hand the way using state transition tables in the obvious way would be time-consuming, even slower than Gordon Rugg's method.   But I haven't put much effort into finding a fast way of doing it, and my words are more realistic.

As far as I know, Gordon Rugg was the first to suggest a well-defined method by which meaningless text could be generated which resembles the Voynich text.   His approach is probably a subset of mine, but they are not equivalent.   Mine is more general, and I arrived at it from a different starting point.

So there's still a lot of work to be done to make a watertight theory.