The Rosettes Page - March 2024

[Mark Knowles]

I do not think the Voynich Manuscript is a constructed language or a cipher text. I think it is a now extinct natural language.

How do you explain the statistical properties of the text?

I leave that to the experts. I think they are doing a fine job.

Yes, but that contradicts your idea that it is written in a now extinct natural language.

WellesleyCollege

Friends of the Library Lecture: Lisa Fagin Davis
Nov 27, 2023

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31:43
So that's another way of looking at it. And then finally another example
31:48
is something called Zipf's law. So one question you have to ask yourself is, is it a language?
31:55
Is it just random nonsense, is it randomly generated? Does it actually represent a human language?
32:02
And one of the tests that linguists use for this is something called Zipf's law,
32:08
which says that the most common word in a language will appear basically twice as often as the next one,
32:16
which will be twice as often as the next one. And so when you graph that frequency, this is what you end up with.
32:22
If you do this for the "Voynich Manuscript", the "Voynich Manuscript," right?
32:28
That was the right reaction. It's really thrilling to see that because that really suggests
32:35
that it is in fact a natural human language. It's not an invented language like Elvish.
32:41
Elvish does not conform to Zipf's law as much as Tolkien wanted it to or Dothraki
32:46
or Klingon or something. This seems to represent a naturally evolving human language.
32:54
We just don't know what language yet.
33:00

Lisa Fagin Davis is a palaeographer, so not necessarily the best person to site regarding the statistical properties of the Voynich text. I suggest on reading up about the statistical properties of Voynichese and you will see the difficulties.