[split] Percentage of word types that occur more than once

[Torsten]

My question was whether the Voynich MS "words" represent complete words in some language, not whether the text is (or seems) meaningful.

I was also talking about the question if the Voynich MS "words" represent words in some natural language. I agree that this arguments neither allow the conclusion that the text is meaningful nor does they indicate a genuine linguistic structure (see also You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). However, this doesn't change the fact that arguments like "the text is structured", "the text follows Zipfs law", and "context dependency along with the illustrations" are used as arguments in favor of the natural language hypotheses.

For instance Amancio et al. are arguing that it is possible to distinguish between the Voynich text and its shuffled version: "We show that it is mostly compatible with natural languages and incompatible with random texts." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Also Montemurro et al. are arguing this way: "The hypothesis that it is simply a nonsensical text either intended as a hoax or made up with any other purpose has debilitated in recent years, due to the increasing evidence of the text’s different levels of organizational structure. These regularities, in fact, are compatible with the presence of some kind of linguistic information." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

Zipfs law was used as an argument by Landini: "Words in natural languages are not uniformly distributed but approach the so-called 'Zipf's law of word frequencies.' ... Figure 1a shows that the Voynich manuscript approximately follows this law." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 278). Montemurro et al. also refer to Landinis argument: "One of the strongest clues in this puzzle is the fact that the frequency of words in the Voynich text obeys Zipf’s law." (Montemurro et al. 2013).

Montemurro et al. also use context dependency as an argument: "These results support the conjecture that there is a match between the linguistic structure and the illustrations of the text." (Montemurro et al. 2013).

Just recently Lisa Fagin Davis adopted this type of argumentation: "Recent linguistic analyses suggest that Voynichese may represent a natural - and as yet unidentified - human language; it isn’t nonsense, and it isn’t an invented language like Elvish or Klingon." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 75).