[Article] Topic Modeling in the Voynich Manuscript

[Barbrey]

I found the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Claire Bowern very interesting. Thankfully Claire is giving more details about the experiment to produce language-like gibberish. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the following description were given: "We tested this point in an undergraduate class and found that beyond about 100 words, the task of writing language-like nonlanguage is very difficult. It is too easy to make local repetitions and words from other languages." (Bowern & Lindemann 2021, p. 289).

In the webinar Claire Bowern describes again that after writing some amount of text it becomes "Hard to get ideas for words". It might be hard to invent new words but it is "easy to repeat words". It is therefore reasonable to repeat words already written instead of inventing new ones. Claire now describes that the students did start to recycle syllable shapes. For example one of the students used a lot of words similar to "kadaya" and also words similar to "gebuni". This observation does in fact match with the observed repetitive text structure in the Voynich Manuscript. One observation for Currier A is that numerous word types similar to the most frequent types "daiin" and "chol" exists. It is even possible to point to text samples like "kol chol chol kor chal sho chol shodan" on f1r.P3.16 (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) or "shol chol shoky okol sho chol shol chal shol chol chol shol ctaiin shos odan" on folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Torsten, what is your own opinon on this?  Could a complex numerical cipher account for that kind of repetition?  Or could no numerical cipher account for it?  I don't quite understand why we're told Voychinese has markers of a true language pattern, but the kind of results Claire reports above seem to me to clearly argue against a true underlying language.  As does the entropy, and honestly just looking at the word patterns and structure, even if we take bigrams into account.  So it has to be ciphered, but for me that begs the question what is the basis for saying Voychinese has markers of a true language?  Do they mean an enciphered true language, or was that conclusion based on these vords as if they were language.  Because if the latter, I don't buy it.  It is all quite confusing.