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

[RenegadeHealer]

I keep hearing rumors, both here and on Nick Pelling's blog, that someone has attempted to execute Torsten Timm's self-citation method using low-tech methods, and failed to replicate his results. 

I'm unaware of any such rumour appearing on my blog.

I'm obviously remembering it wrong then.

Torsten Timm's self-citation method is very testable, and I swear I've heard mention of people trying it. If I could afford to, I'd fund a trial of it on the cheap, because I'm very curious to see just how easy or difficult it is to execute using nothing more than a brain and a writing utensil, just how much the output resembles the VMs statistically, and how much both of these factors vary from person to person.

I think I'm going to do an academic literature dive sometime soon looking for studies of asemic writing and pseudolanguage both spoken and written, from an information science or neuropsych perspective. I'm hoping to find that someone at some point has paid a small group of people to generate a large amount of written (or audio-recorded and transcribed oral) pseudolanguage, analyzed the output, and published it in a journal. If the raw data these kinds of experiments generated tended to deviate statistically from comparable-length specimens of real language in the same general ways that Voynichese does, I think that would bolster Timm and Schinner's ideas a great deal. If on the other hand this was not observed, that doesn't rule out the VMs being stochastically generated pseudolanguage. But it doesn't support it.