The incompatibility of Voynichese with natural human language

[MarcoP]

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?

Thank you, Jonas, that sounds interesting!
I am not sure I understand correctly the kind of repetition in Kalevala. Is it perfect-reduplication like e.g. daiin daiin? If so, is it anywhere close to the almost 1% rate in the VMS?

A while ago, Koen pointed out Latin poetry with several occurrences of immediately repeated words (his "MiscCarmina" collection, discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). But in that case the perfect-reduplication rate was still too low (about 0.5%). Moreover, quasi reduplication is extremely rare in that case (about 0.1%).