Which plaintext languages to try?

[oshfdk]

Might also want to consider this as well: Sabir, a fifteenth century proto-pidgin. It would be the language of trade.

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Thank you for the suggestion! I'm not sure pidgins are good candidates for large manuscripts though. As far as I understand, they would be normally used for some limited communication to simplify trade. Quoting the Wikipedia article: "Because it is a pidgin Mediterranean Lingua Franca had a very small vocabulary, this and the fact the language is not well attested means we only have knowledge of a few hundred words in the language."

From my point of view the Voynichese does not look like plaintext for any natural language, there are too many short repetitions and too few long repetitions or patterns. To me this looks like a one-to-many cipher (not necessarily verbose). But if it is not a natural language plaintext, but a cipher, then why assume an exotic or rare language plaintext, unless there are some specific reasons for this.