On plain texts and ciphers (a thought experiment)

[MarcoP]

I guess it's not much use, but i'm telling you now for the last time that the manuscript is from the 15th century (C14) and the script is a Gothic script of the 15th century and the rest of the manuscript also fits there, one of the consequences is that the language is probably  Latin with  some German  and as long as you won't accept this you won't make any progress

Can you read it?

Yes, of course,  at least most of it, there are some things I am not sure, everybody can who has some basic knowleddge of Latin palaeography, Only it is so highly abbreviated, that I dont understand great parts of it

Hi Helmut,
adding to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but from a different angle than entropy, there are other considerations that suggest something else than abbreviated Latin. The following are only examples.

In Voynichese EVA, only 8 characters appear frequently in the word final position: (y r n l s m o d). This figure does not change much if you use a different transcription system: Jacques Guy only found 6 frequent word ending characters (Table 2 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., based on Bennett's transcription system).  Similar numbers can be observed with unabbreviated Latin texts: the common endings are -s, -m, -e, -t, -a, -i, -r, -o. See also the Mattioli suffixes graph You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
In a Latin abbreviated text, there are many more possible endings. In this tiny You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. fragment (less than 40 words) there are 14 different word endings: about the double of what we averagely see in 100 Voynichese words!
   

So, the limited number of endings rules out abbreviated Latin but seems compatible with the unabbreviated language. If we look slightly deeper into the histograms, it is clear that also unabbreviated Latin does not work. Voynichese most common ending -y occurs about 40% of the times: almost half of the words have the same ending. Even in unabbreviated Latin, the most frequent ending character (-s) is only slightly more frequent than 20%. In abbreviated Latin, the figure will be even smaller (e.g. -us and -es will be written differently, -9 and -es). I believe it is totally impossible to think of a long Latin text in which 40% of the words have the same ending.

Another, unrelated element, which I find strongly suggestive of something different from Latin and most European languages, is the high number of reduplicated words: i.e. words which are repeated identically two (and sometimes more) times consecutively. In the VMS, reduplication occurs more than once every 100 words (more than once per page, on the average). Reduplication is a well known linguistic phenomenon and we know that languages with similar or even higher reduplication rates exist, but not among the main European languages. In my eyes, this excludes both "direct phonetic" and abbreviated Latin, and also all Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, English ciphers which map identical sequences of characters into identical sequences of sounds.