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

[Emma May Smith]

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.

Certainly this is a reasonable way of thinking about it. But it's not so easy to go from "had to look like a natural language" to actually defining that and then implementing it. I accept that Zipf's law is not a marker of language (that is one of the key points about the law) but it is simply one thing they a) had to achieve to make the text "look" like a language, and b) simply weren't aware of. There are many others things they likewise had to manage to achieve.

Without knowing the method by which the text was constructed we can only propose increasingly sophisticated methods which are plausible, but unproven. There is a problem with many Voynich models that they simply model what we know about the text when the models were created and not the text itself. Every new discovery outdates them and will continue to do so. The proposed methods are only as sophisticated as our knowledge, yet we also need to believe that the creators can be as sophisticated as we need them to be.

While we can accept that any method would produce any number of patterns, there's no reason why many or most of those patterns would be consistent with language unless intentionally planned. Of course, not everything in the text is consistent with language, entropy being the most important one. Yet the problem with entropy is that the words are too regularly structured and glyphs too predictable. How did the creators not realise that the individual words were unnatural, even though they could see them, yet manage to create the other patterns they were unaware of? The creators must have possessed an odd mixture of luck and incompetence.