[Movie] This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The text of the Voynich Manuscript (VMS) exhibits consistent internal structure, statistical patterns, and positional rules that can’t be ignored, regardless of personal belief about its meaning or origin. Some of these key observations include:

Sorry, but all those claims of "unlike any natural language" are wrong. 

• Extreme repetition: A meaningful text in any natural language can be arbitrarily repetitive. 
  
• Low conditional entropy: Again, the character entropy is a property of the encoding (cypher or spelling system), not of the language.  The word entropy is quite in the normal range. And even that is a property of the particular text, not of the language.
  
• Binomial word-length distribution: Since you cited my 2002 webpage, you should know that East Asian monosyllabic languages do have a binomial word-length distribution.
  
• Lack of clear word order or repeated phrases: Again, this is a property of the text, not of the language.  But East Asian languages do give the impression of having no fixed word order.
  
• Systematic shifts from Currier A to Currier B: Those "language shifts" are perfectly compatible with each section having been copied or summarized from a different book on a different topic -- even if the books were all in the same natural language.
  
• Context-dependent self-similarity: Again, it is quite possible that a meaningful text in any language would have this feature.
  
• Deep correlation between frequency, similarity, and spatial proximity What do you mean, precisely?  Those terms can describe normal features of texts in natural languages.
  
• A single network of similar word forms: Monosyllabic languages have such "networks of similar forms" because of the fixed structure of the syllables.
  
• Random walk-like statistical behavior and long-range correlations: What do you mean, precisely? Texts in natural languages generally have "random-walk like behavior" and "long-range correlations".
  
• Lines function as structural units: There are simple explanations for why the Scribe could have created such patterns.  Like stretching, squeezing, or abbreviating the text to get line breaks falling on sentence boundaries when possible.
  
• Absence of semantic categories (e.g., nouns vs. verbs): Like most East Asian languages.
  
• No identifiable function words: Like most East Asian languages.
  
• No evidence of word roots: Like most East Asian languages.
  
• No corrections or deleted sequences: Surely it was not written directly on vellum, even if it was a hoax.  The Author wrote a final draft on paper and recruited a Scribe to copy it onto vellum. But in fact there are many instances of corrections and uncorrected errors made by the Scribe.
  
• Line-endings fit precisely into available space: Again, a normal product of a minimally competent Scribe.