[Article] A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript

[Torsten]

This is a property of Voynichese that I have observed, so I am not going to argue that this phenomenon happens. It does.

But immediately after this statement, your paper moves to the "text generation method" section and in this section you describe "the changes for similar glyph groups occurring near to each other".

If I were writing about the same phenomenon, I probably would have described them in terms of "differences" and "similarities". The term "changes" (and the words "removed" and "added" that you use under the illustration) describe an active conscious copy-and-modify process.

Indeed, I provided the self-citation hypothesis in 2014: "The statistical features of the text can be explained by the hypothesis that the author of the VMS was using the described self-referencing system to generate the text." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 17). I find it important to mention that the hypothesis is based on the results of an analysis of the text. One result is that "the closer two words are (with respect to their edit distance), the more likely these words also can be found written in close vicinity" and the other result is a "characteristic dependence of token frequency from word similarity" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Anyway, if René was just providing a very short presentation of the self-citation hypothesis this is indeed not a problem in my eyes.

Such an active process might, in fact, account for some of the properties of the VMS (I haven't decided yet), but I also think there are other dynamics that might account for these kinds of patterns in the text. Unfortunately, it's not something I can explain in a few words, just as your paper cannot easily be summarized in a few words.

I also searched for other dynamics. I didn't found anything that can't be explained by the self-citation hypothesis.