It is very hard to answer this question as a simple yes/no question. But I do think that you bring out some important points in your post, and then without going to deep dive into a lot of statistical "mumbo-jumbo", it would maybe help a little to bring out the, at least for me, most simple and outstanding feature of the Voynich script, based on a very simple metric. That is: the lack of longer repeated sequences (if you first of all assume a phonetic writing system). I have yet not found any text written by humans and containing meaningful content which lacks longer repeated sequences of 4-5 words or more. There always appears to be some redundancy in human language to a given degree, for a text as long as the Voynich text. But this itself does not automatically lead one to automatically believe that the Voynich manuscript contains just meaningless text.
First, the text could be mostly meaningless, containing some meaning here and there. Perhaps due to being written in a very confused or obfuscated way, either deliberate or not. We do not know what type of document it is or it's purpose. It is also very interesting that analyzing a badly degraded meaningful text with lots of uncertainties in its character-interpretations will bring out similar statistical repetition patterns as the Voynich-transliterated text, i.e. many repeated 2-word or 3-word sequences, but basically absence of longer sequences. But the text is very clearly written and not badly degraded, and it does not seem to have a lot of ambiguities in its character-glyph encoding, so what is the explanation?
Second, the most brought out discussion, that it has been encrypted. But this has to then be in a way that makes it retain a certain structure and non-randomness, which is unusual or very hard to accomplish for longer texts.
Apart from the lack if longer sequences, you could also make the claim that the frequent repetitions of the same word one after another is incompatible with natural texts. The Voynich manuscript contains about twice as many consequent word-repetitions as would be expected of a randomly word-shuffled text. Indeed, most natural language writings contain many fewer consequent repetitions than their random counterpart. So that basically while identical words in most natural texts tends to avoid each other in proximity, the Voynich words behave more like magnets and wants to stick together. It is therefore also interesting to note that there is in fact one well known text in natural language containing meaning that has words behaving like magnets instead of what is usual for a natural writing, and it also shows about twice as many repetitions as its random counterpart: the Finnish work "Kalevala", collated by Elias Lönnrot (1835) (available from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). This is an example of a poetic writing/prose and this particular found "black swan" perfectly shows the tendency to perhaps sometimes get too misled by our own cultural expectations and assumptions of writings, given the "typical" (and most statistical analyses will be based on the typical samples due to the lack of availability of a few good atypical candidates) - and we know that the Voynich book is a very atypical book, so why should we expect anything else of the text it contains?
First, the text could be mostly meaningless, containing some meaning here and there. Perhaps due to being written in a very confused or obfuscated way, either deliberate or not. We do not know what type of document it is or it's purpose. It is also very interesting that analyzing a badly degraded meaningful text with lots of uncertainties in its character-interpretations will bring out similar statistical repetition patterns as the Voynich-transliterated text, i.e. many repeated 2-word or 3-word sequences, but basically absence of longer sequences. But the text is very clearly written and not badly degraded, and it does not seem to have a lot of ambiguities in its character-glyph encoding, so what is the explanation?
Second, the most brought out discussion, that it has been encrypted. But this has to then be in a way that makes it retain a certain structure and non-randomness, which is unusual or very hard to accomplish for longer texts.
Apart from the lack if longer sequences, you could also make the claim that the frequent repetitions of the same word one after another is incompatible with natural texts. The Voynich manuscript contains about twice as many consequent word-repetitions as would be expected of a randomly word-shuffled text. Indeed, most natural language writings contain many fewer consequent repetitions than their random counterpart. So that basically while identical words in most natural texts tends to avoid each other in proximity, the Voynich words behave more like magnets and wants to stick together. It is therefore also interesting to note that there is in fact one well known text in natural language containing meaning that has words behaving like magnets instead of what is usual for a natural writing, and it also shows about twice as many repetitions as its random counterpart: the Finnish work "Kalevala", collated by Elias Lönnrot (1835) (available from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). This is an example of a poetic writing/prose and this particular found "black swan" perfectly shows the tendency to perhaps sometimes get too misled by our own cultural expectations and assumptions of writings, given the "typical" (and most statistical analyses will be based on the typical samples due to the lack of availability of a few good atypical candidates) - and we know that the Voynich book is a very atypical book, so why should we expect anything else of the text it contains?
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