How much work to write an enciphered manuscript v one with complex meaningless text?

[Mark Knowles]

My question is based on the thought as to whether it makes sense for the author to have consciously produced text which was deliberately totally meaningless or whether he/she could have achieved their same goal by producing an enciphered text copied from elsewhere, if say the manuscript was some kind of hoax.

If it required the same effort, so there was not extra effort involved in producing a meaningless text than a difficult to decipher text, what could be the purpose in producing a specifically meaningless text. If the author used some mechanism like a cardan grille then it may not be much effort to produce meaningless text, but I think the evidence counts against the hypothesis that it was produced by some mechanism of that kind.

It seems that you assume that writing a meaningless text would result in an unstructured/random text. But this is not the case. It is far from easy if not impossible to avoid any repetitions/patterns. Even if someone writes something meaningful it is possible to detect his style (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). In the same way it is far from easy to avoid cribs while encoding a secret message (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). With other words no additional effort is needed to produce a structured meaningless text and a lot of effort is needed to generate an unstructured text of any kind. 

You can test it yourself by trying to write some pages full of unstructured meaningless text. There is no doubt that to invent new text is always harder than to copy text. But to copy text is not the most efficient way to generate text. It is even more efficient to repeat or to vary the same words like in 'qokeedy qokeedy qokeedy qotey qokeey qokeey otedy'.

This means structure is not enough to decide if a text has meaning or not. Instead it is necessary to look into the details. Moreover, as more structured a text is as more clues to the language, encoding system, or text generation method exists (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

If you want to produce text that looks meaningful, but is in fact meaningless that seems not so easy.(Even if you don't think it looks meaningful, it does to many people.) I think it would be much more difficult to produce the kind of text we see in the Voynich than to copy from another source using a simple substitution cipher. Especially when the Voynich text is not neatly structured. If you are inventing complex structured text whether meaningless or not I would say it is more difficult than to copy text even if one uses an early 15th century diplomatic cipher to encode it. So what is the purpose of deliberately producing meaningless text, if it is more effort? From my point of view as you know it is to mask meaningful text. By mixing the meaningful with meaningless it makes it harder to decide what is what.

Have you conducted an experiment by asking someone unfamiliar with the Voynich to produce a page of meaningless text in the Voynich script without any prompting, but which should look like it could be meaningful? And time how long it takes them and look at the results.

You could then take another person and ask them to copy a page of text using a substitution cipher using the Voynich script and time them.