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

[Anton]

n essence, because gibberish is by nature random, it should not display any of the higher level organizational properties that The Voynich Manuscript displays (as summarized here in §3.3 and §4). The Voynich Manuscript is highly unusual and non-language like at the character level. For measures that look above the word to line and paragraph, as well as in the distribution of words across the manuscript, it looks like a natural language. This strongly implies that the manuscript is encoded natural language rather than gibberish, since the measures used to track the paragraph structure are very unlikely to be directly manipulated and so are a good indicator of real structure.

This is a weak point, and I'd be careful with the word "random".  A natural language's flow is also "by nature random". On the other hand, I can't see why gibberish by nature random cannot exhibit organizational properties say, on the paragraph level. Imagine you restart your pseudorandom gibberish generator with each new paragraph.

It's not organizational properties lying on the surface that threaten the gibberish theory, but rather indirect indicators, such as when I find two most common Voynich star labels in the same paragraph on the title page, I believe that's a really curious coincidence for gibberish.

I haven't yet read the article farther than that.

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The Zipf law conformance does NOT tell anything about whether the sequence is natural language or not. I think this has been discussed more than once in the forum.