[Movie] This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

[dashstofsk]

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?

We can only guess what method the author used to generate the text. But if one section of the manuscript is an artificial fabrication then all of it is going to be so. If it can be shown that at least some part of it is fabricated then the main objective has been achieved. There will be no great need then to try to explain every word, every oddity, nor to attempt to give a precise method of construction.

But also humans never have been good at simulating randomness. And it seems to me that many of the 'vertical impact effects' and Torsten Timm's 'long distance effects' are the sort of things that were observed when Gaskell and Bowern had people participate in an experiment to create meaningless text.

The author isn't an automaton. Mistakes, irregularities, oddities are to be expected. Most likely knowing that the text would be undecypherable he did not feel it important to be precise or to follow any particular writing standard.