[Blog Post] Peter Bakker on the VMS

[Torsten]

- I don't think that the Timm (and Schinner) approach really explains the repetitions of high-frequency words. The method is basically arbitrary, so it is suggested that the person executing it would occasionally just (arbitrarily) repeat the very last word he had just written several times. This is not really a good explanation. It is only something that cannot be excluded.

Renè Zandbergen is arguing here that a hypothesis saying that the words in the Voynich manuscript are just repeated (with some additional modifications) would not be able to explain the repetition of words. This is absurd only. If words are copied from previously written words this means that more frequent word are copied more often. As a result the self-citation method predicts that high-frequency words should occur together with similar words and also should have a higher chance to occur repeated. This is exactly what we see in the Voynich manuscript.