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

[DonaldFisk]

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.

I generated some You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..   (So did Gordon Rugg and Torsten Timm, by different methods.)

I was aware of Zipf's Law, and that it was followed by the Voynich Manuscript, at the time I generated my fake Voynich Manuscript, but following Zipf's Law was an accidental output, not an input.   All my method required was a set of tables for choosing the current glyph given the previous glyph, and a method for generating random numbers.   My method wasn't quite correct but it was enough to follow Zipf's Law, and that wasn't intentional (though I would have rejected it and tried something else if it didn't).

The question we should really be asking is, "How likely is it that someone in the early 15th Century would use a method which resulted in text which followed Zipf's Law?"   The constraint they would have been working to is that it had to look like a natural language.   The bare minimum for that is that the choice of current glyphs depends on the previous one, and I think that would have been obvious even at the time the Voynich Manuscript was written.