[Article] A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript

[ReneZ]

Randomness does not have to be uniform, it can be subject to rules, constraints and preferences. The new paper acknowledges the existence of something like the Curve-Line system and any number of preferences for esthetic reasons and whatever the scribe's inspiration was which are impossible to model accurately. This is vague enough to evade falsification.

I did not want to use the word 'random', which has a specific meaning in probability theory which is not equivalent with 'arbitrary'. In day-to-day use, random and arbitrary tend to be considered similar.

The theory is about the appearance of new words slightly modified from previous words. These modifications are not at all arbitrary, but follow specific (unknown) rules.
The most conspicuous features of the Voynich MS text, namely the existence of word patterns and the very limited ways in which characters combine, are not explained by the auto-copying process, but must be the result of additional constraints or rules, which are not identified.

As it stands, these word patterns and limited character combinations 'just happened'. In that sense, the theory is inadequate, even if it explains some other features.

But there are more known features of the text that are not explained by the auto-copying process:
- the fact that Eva-f and Eva-p mainly (but not exclusively) appear on top lines of paragraphs.
- that Eva-m and Eva-g occur only at word ends, and the former mainly at line ends
- that paragraph-initial characters are from a small subset only
- that line-initial words are different and follow some rules that are not yet understood

Of course, all of these can be accommodated by additional rules and constraints.
However, we then end up in a situation where there is not much arbitrariness left, and it is hard to maintain that all of these constraints cannot be the result of 'meaning'.

Furthermore, the fact that similar words tend to appear near each other could be explained by other effects, for example:
- building up the 'code' vocabulary as the text is produced
- Friedman's suggestion of some kind of a synthetic language
- every word stands only for one character, so the words are meaningless but the text as a whole is not

Now we have four options already, and I don't actually consider all of them likely. The first bullet above is the first thing that came to my mind when I read Torsten's first paper.

It should be noted that the existence of word patterns is a feature of the vocabulary, i.e. the corpus of valid words. This says nothing about the meaning of the text.
The meaning (or lack thereof) is related to the order in which the words have been picked from this corpus.