[Article] The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript (Bowern et al. 2020)

[Stephen Carlson]

Now that I've a had a chance to read the paper, I'd say that it is clear and generally well-written but it is best viewed as setting forth the status quaestionis of the VM rather than advancing a key new insight.

The paper does not consider Schinner and Timm's work, which in my view is a major oversight since their auto-citation proposal, if I understand it correctly, can generate some of the supposed linguistic features discussed in the paper (like the Zipfian behaviors).

They are also probably too quick to a late medieval/early modern fake here:

We also consider it unlikely that the The Voynich Manuscript is an ancient hoax. The cost associated with the production of such a manuscript and the number of people involved make it unlikely that it was created purely to deceive. A much smaller hoax would have served the same purpose with much less expense. Moreover, people who assume that the manuscript is a medieval gibberish hoax massively underestimate the amount of effort required to produce sustained language-like nonsense.5

In my view, arguments that something can't be a fake because it involves too much effort are poor. The Hilter Diaries impressed people because the forger produced 60 volumes, but it merely showed the industriousness of the forger. Besides "purely to deceive," is too narrow of a reason to produce. Many fakes are sold (or attempted to be sold) for solid money. Indeed the purchase history of this codex, in script no one can read, is good confirmation that an unreadable book can fetch a pretty penny.

The footnote 5 is pretty interesting: "5. We tested this point in an undergraduate class and found that beyond about 100 words, the task of writing language-like non-language is very difficult. It is too easy to make local repetitions and words from other languages."

I'd like to know more about this undergraduate experiment--as well as others in asemic writing--especially on the nature of local repetitions (how are they comparable to the VM's repetitiousness?). Again, here, some engagement with the Schinner & Timm proposal may be enlightening. Can undergraduates, briefly trained in auto-citation, simulate features of the text?

Very helpful is their conclusions on character entropy:

The entropy of Voynichese is unlike any other language or script. Plausible manipulations of the script were investigated, including various shorthand abbreviations and devoweling the script. These do affect the character entropy, but not to the extent that would be required to bring Voynichese to the level of other languages. The only manipulation of this type that brings the conditional entropy to Voynich levels is systematic conflation of phonemic distinctions, such as conflating all vowels to a single character, recoding based on dividing characters into whether they occur in the first or second half of the alphabet, or sorting all characters in the word into alphabetical order.

If these options for the character entropy are correct, I would say that it does not bode well for having a now-meaningful text (as opposed to a once-meaning text), since "systematic conflation of phonemic distinctions" and "sorting all characters in the word into alphabetical order" loses information. Perhaps the second option, "recoding based on dividing characters into whether they occur in the first or second half of the alphabet," does not lose information, depending on how it's done.