12-04-2020, 05:57 PM
(12-04-2020, 05:37 PM)davidjackson wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As I remember from when I attempted the test references above, it was quite difficult for me. Not that that means anything, many things are!
However, I think we need to think about the mindset of the times. How would a 15th century intelectual go about producing a hoax text? Would they? Would it even make sense for them to attempt it, to produce gibberish on the scale of the voynich?
Well, of course my own personal perspective, as I have mentioned elsewhere, is that the Voynich contains a mixture of meaningless filler text and meaningful real text.
So I suppose a more exact formulation of the test would be one where someone is given a shortish text, say half a page, and they must produce 2 pages of text containing the shortish text and filled in with a page and a half of nonsense words such that it is difficult for someone to tell which is which. All text would then be written in a made up script with a one to one mapping of imaginary characters to letters of alphabet. Then the question becomes what would be the likely pattern and layout of the meaningless text that the author produces? I think it won't be purely random, but how will it be structured?