List of "weird" vords

[Mark Knowles]

around 20% of words are real words

You are piling up the improbabilities and suggesting that the manuscript is some horrendous mixture of valid text, fabrication, encypherment. This is too complicated. Consider it from the perspective of the authors. In addition to the task of having to write a thing of ~225 pages and ~36000 words using strange letters would they really have wanted to make things even more difficult by jumping between fabrication and encypherment? No, they would have wanted simplicity. Also afterwards they themselves would have found the manuscript difficult to read.

But did I read correctly that you think that 80% of the text might be bogus filler words? Why would they have wanted to waste so much parchment on meaningless words? But also look at the HerbalA1 pages. 95 pages of 8086 words gives an average of 85 words to a page. And then only 20% of those are real words, making 17. That is hardly enough to say anything of value about the plants the text is supposed to chronicle. All this pother just just to hide the meaning of those 17 words?

Somehow it just doesn’t seem very clever of the authors.

I am not distinguishing between "valid text" and "encipherment". I am distinguishing between "null text"/"filler text" and "valid text". Without identifying the "valid text" it seems impossible to know whether it is enciphered or not. Simplicity is nice, but by its very nature encipherment cuts against simplicity.

It is not uncommon for enciphered text to contain filler text. They would have "wasted" so much parchment on meaningless words precisely because it would make it hard for someone to identify the real text. Null characters were very commonly used in ciphers of the time. You can say something of importance in 17 words.

It was very clever of the authors if it made it very difficult for us to read.

I have thought this the most likely explanation for Voynichese for a number of years.