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

[Torsten]

The autocopying theory is a very good example for what i call ahistorical, like the hoax or the fake theory. It has nothing to do with a 15th c. ms., it is a concept of the 21st c. projected onto the 15th c.

To come back to T.T. and his theory J. Hermes: Like many other theories, Talbot, Tucker, Rugg, andd so on it is simply ahistorical, it ignores the simple, undisputable fact that we have in B. 408 a document of the first half of the 15th c. and it projects 20th c. concepts into the Late Middle Ages.

To which concept of the 21st century do you refer?

The "self-citation" process is "easily executable without additional tools even by a medieval scribe" (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 2019, Abstract).  Moreover, to copy text manually was the only possible way to duplicate text before the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg! 

It is reasonable to assume that with some training it is very efficient to copy a text using the text itself as a source. For doing so it is not necessary to switch between an external source and the text being written. Nor is it necessary to check or to correct copy errors if the generated text has no meaning (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 40). Therefore, the "self-citation" method is the most effective way to generate some meaningless filler text manually.

A text generated by "self-citation" would change over time. Moreover it is expected for the "self-citation" method that not only the frequency and similarity of word tokens would be correlated, but also similarity and relative position (see Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 13ff). This is exactly what we see for the text in the Voynich manuscript (see Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 2ff). With other words it is possible to use the "self-citation" process to describe the text in the Voynich manuscript.