A case for Gibberish

[-JKP-]

Dear JKP,

My imagination is quite healthy, because I have peered into the Voynich Manuscript since 2009, thank you very much!

It was not intended as an insult. It's simply a statement of how I see things. I have seen many situations where looking deeper or wider can provide less-obvious answers.

I do take the spaces literally, because they are used and are there.

Ciphers often obfuscate spaces. I don't know if the VMS is a cipher, but if it is, then we should always be suspicious of spaces, especially when entropy doesn't appear to add up.

How common is it for a manuscript with so many references, images and ideas to have no punctuation from medieval times; that's 240 pages long to not have any punctuation whatsoever, can you reference any others?

There are many that lack commas and periods, but they make up for the lack of these by having many abbreviations, and some of those are indicated with symbols. So, it depends how broadly you define punctuation. If the VMS is a cipher, there might be a glyph standing in for a phrase break. In fact, I'll nominate the gallows chars as one possibility. Note how frequently they occur at the beginnings of paragraphs. That is not how letters usually behave. In medieval texts, capitula (pilcrows) are frequently used to break up phrases within paragraphs. I have posted several examples.

From Bullet points 3 & 5 you seemed conflicted admitting yes and no to repeats for languages and geometric repeats are different from repeated words that are right next to each other.

Conflicted? I'm not conflicted. There is more than one way to look at it. That's not a conflict, it's a range of possibilities. Read my blog on Chechen. There are natural languages that use the same spelling for completely different words. Also, if the tokens are syllables rather than words, then one would EXPECT a high degree of repetition. If the tokens are numbers, then one would also expect a high degree of repetition.

JKP have you read Schinner paper?  I think the label is very evident from the way the imagery is simplistic so to is the label even if it came from a mechanism which produced random gibberish.  Lastly all languages usually contain a finite (low amount I should say) amount of vowels and a simple scan at for glyphs would show an abundance of lonely  glyphs characters which also stand out against a frequency attack.

Yes, I have read the Schinner/Timm papers. I think they should be required reading. There are very few papers about the VMS text that explore the patterns in a wholistic way and I think they have done quite a good job of this. That does not mean I necessarily agree with the conclusion. I can see other ways in which such patterns could manifest without autocopying.