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

[Emma May Smith]

The dismissal of the text as fake or gibberish is good and solid. They used the comparisons of Zipf's law, proportional frequency, and MATTR to show that the Voynich text is broadly similar to natural language. While these measures are measuring related things, all three would be hard to fake.

As with the Zipfian word distribution, we find Voynich to be well within the expected values for natural language texts, and far from random gibberish. If the Voynich text is meaningless, its creators mimicked natural language in a sophisticated way.

I don't find it credible that a hoaxer before 1910 could have achieved this either by design or by luck.