[Movie] Is the Voynich Manuscript an Elaborate Medieval Hoax?

[Torsten]

Sledge argues that the type of cipher that would produce the VM text is beyond the horizon of the Middle Ages (I assume it would need entropy-reducing features like verbose elements, strategically introducing spaces, positional variations and so on). It is unattested. This is true. But the alternative method proposed is also unattested in the Middle Ages. The fact that it can be done in modern times is made somewhat less relevant by Sledge's argumentation, since he pays attention to what we could and could not expect in the Middle Ages.

Actually Sledge argumentation didn't depend on the idea that such a cipher is unattested in the Middle Ages since even today such a cipher is not known.

At least pseudo writing is known also for medieval times: See for instance the decorative pseudo texts as described in "Writing that isn’t. Pseudo-scripts in comparative view" (Houston, S. 2018, p. 21-48. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.): "Other examples include : an illumination in a Medieval manuscript of ceramics in an apothecary’s shop with pseudo-Hebrew ..." and "The second pseudo-scripter, a very different case, is the late Medieval painter Robert Campin (c. 1378-1444), otherwise termed the Master of Flémalle" The pseudo inscriptions are much shorter but they typically contain "repeated or illegible signs."

The other question is, can it be done. This would ideally be tested by having a few participants unaware of the VM text study the method for a while, let them practice a bit, and then have them use it to produce a text. It is important that the volunteers are not very familiar with the VM or haven't read an EVA transcription, because otherwise they'd know what they're aiming for. This should be done using pen and paper, without the aid of computers. I know this is practically almost impossible - any test that requires volunteers is hard to get done - but it would be an interesting test to see how the human mind interacts with these rules, and how quickly text is generated.

You still didn't explain why the participants must be unaware of the VM text. The students have not studied the Voynich text in detail and never heard of the self citation hypothesis.

Claire Bowern clearly describes that after writing about 100 words it become increasingly difficult to think of new words. Only for this reason the students began to repeat themselves. If you want to come up with something new, it is a creative and therefore laborious process. It simply does not matter whether you want to write something meaningless or not: "It is a dramatic observation that when human subjects are asked to generate random sequences, they normally cannot produce sequences that satisfy accepted criteria for randomness" (Treismann and Faulkner 1987: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)

D'Imperio even describes this method as the natural method to generate pseudo text: "The scribe, faced with the task of thinking up a large number of such dummy sequences, would naturally tend to repeat parts of neighboring strings with various small changes and additions to fill out the line until the next message-bearing word or phrase." (D'Imperio 1978, p. 31).