[Movie] This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

[tavie]

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

[*]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.

[*]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.

On systematic shifts between A and B:
The differences between Currier A and B (or indeed Lisa's top three scribes) are surely far too extensive to ascribe to only subject matter.  

On simple explanations for Line Patterns/LAAFU:
I cannot see how line patterns are like any natural language.  This is for the reasons I gave in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in your thread here, and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.at Voynich Day last year.  The problem Torsten is citing here is bigger than simply abbreviations at line end, and even then the patterns do not look like natural language.

• Line Start:  Word types are different at line start than elsewhere in the line.  It is more than simply adding a new initial glyph onto a word type for whatever reason.  Both middle glyphs and final glyphs can be different.  And I cannot think of any natural-language reason for how scribes avoid certain glyphs appearing under other ones.
  
• Line End:  Word types are different at line start than elsewhere in the line.  It is more than simply a final glyph cluster being abbreviated into final m.  We often see different initials as well.  Glyphs pop up in common line end words in ways that aren't common in mid-line words.
  
• Top Row:  Word types are different at paragraph start, at the line end of top row, and importantly in the middle of top row.  It is more than simply a matter of exchanging gallows.  Other glyphs appear unusually predominantly or rarely.  
  

Taken all together, I cannot see how this is like a natural language.  There are two overlapping questions that I take from it:  

1. How can these patterns be compatible with meaning and 
   
2. How were these patterns produced?  
   

I am drawing a blank for how a natural language plaintext could answer these questions.  We would surely have to find "natural" linguistic or subject matter/stylistic reasons for all of the above effects, and this does not seem viable to me.  

If a plaintext is lurking there, then some set of - potentially diverse - processes has been applied to it.  To me, this would necessitate a cypher to be a part of those processes.  Or - if we do not want to assume intent to conceal - it would need something with the effect of a cypher.  Either way, while we have yet to find a set of processes that answers questions 1 and 2, I don't think it can be ruled out the way we can rule out unaltered natural language.  

The meaningless hypothesis has a big advantage in that the first question is settled. There is no need for these patterns to be compatible with meaning.  So what if word types in various positions are different from mid-line word types?  It doesn't matter.  There is no meaning.  

But the second question is pertinent.  If meaningless text is generated by scribes in systems like Torsten's, how are these patterns generated so consistently?  There would need to be a set of rules that either require these patterns or result in them as a byproduct, or a mixture of the two.  This seems a bigger obstacle, e.g. if the text is meaningless, what system could result in vertical pairs like o-o being anathema when vertical pairs like s-s are just fine?