Discussion of "A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript"

[Torsten]

If I am not mistaken, when the vertical distances are restricted to the same page the diagrams are much different:

The purpose of figure 4 is to illustrate the level of context dependency within the VMS. What we actually say about the context dependency is: "No obvious rule can be deduced which words form the top-frequency tokens at a specific location, since a token dominating one page might be rare or missing on the next one. However, all pages containing at least some lines of text do have in common that pairs of frequently used words with high mutual similarity appear" (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 3). 

Figure 4 is indeed not perfect since it only gives a high level view for the whole VMS. It is an improvement to compare figure 4 with a corresponding graph showing the results restricted to the same page. The result confirms our statement that each page is dominated by words with high mutual similarity and that tokens dominating one page might be rare or missing on the next one (see also You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 14 and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 3f). This result is also confirmed if we look into individual pages (see 1.3 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). This result confirms that in the VMS tokens co-occur with similar ones. This observation also confirms that local repetition is a key feature for the VMS.

Anyway, the whole discussion about an alternative experiment to simulate a high level graph as given in figure 4 is at best a sidetrack. Moreover, an alternative experiment suggests that you accept that the original experiment indeed confirms that it was possible for a medieval scribe to generate meaningless text which statistically appear to have features of language. Therefore I would suggest that we focus the discussion to the observations and the argumentation presented in our paper (see for instance my posts about the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. presented in chapter 2 and about the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. presented in chapter 5).