[Movie] This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

[Mauro]

[quote='Mauro' pid='68025' dateline='1750769800']



How did the scribe mantained the coherence of words structure using a 'copy-and-modify' mechanism along so many pages,... ?

I think the answer is already in the question: not at all.

That may be too, admittely. 

I have thought a little about this and I think the objection stands (there are two objections, actually). I'll briefly give some examples in the following, writing a full analysis would be a very long task, I might endeavour in it but at the moment this is what I have. But first I want to say that if you asked me one year ago what the VMS is and how it was written I would have blissfully answered: "Probably meaningless, generated with some algorithm (ie. with dices and a rulebook, or directly in the mind of the scribe), probably along the line of Torsten's paper". It was a sad day when the objection(s) came to my mind, because I had to revert to a gloomy "I don't know at all, it could be anything". So if I am wrong, I will be happy!

I focus on rule #3 of Torsten's paper "A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript" (the easiest rule to analyze because it basically needs just one parameter to be implemented: the probability of choosing rule #3 among the possible rules):

(3) Combine two source words to create a new word. As an example, the two words <chol > and <daiin > combine to <choldaiin > or <cholaiin >. 

The first objection is that I'd expect the frequency of a combined word A+B to be proportional to the frequency of A multiplied by the frequency of B. For instance 'daiin' and 'ol' are the most frequent words (Rf1a-n transcription, whole text) so I'd expect 'oldaiin' and 'daiinol' to be the most frequent composite words. But this does not happen: 'daiinol' has only one occurrence,'oldaiin' has 6. I can explain 'daiinol' easily to myself, by adding a parameter, that is to say a rule such as 'n almost always terminates a word, so rule #3 is only very rarely allowed to proceed when the word which is being 'copied-and-modified' ends with 'n'. But 'oldaiin' is harder to explain: why 6 occurrences, when 'chodaiin' gets 47, and 'cho' is much rarer than 'ol' (*)? It seems parameters (rules) are needed here too, and to accomodate all the cases like this, which are too improbable to be due to chance alone, one would need a lot of parameters. Or equivalently, with a human scribe creating words in his mind instead of a computer, the mental picture the scribe has of the structure of Voynich words must be quite complicated.

The second objection is that this behaviour seem to carry across the whole manuscript: notwithstanding all the statistical variations between the different sections of the VMS (which means many of the 'rules' actually do change with time, and is one of the things Torsten's SelfCitation explain rather neatly) 'chodaiin' is always much more represented vs. 'oldaiin' than what would be expected. I think it's improbable that a 'mental rule' like this can remain in place when the scribe is freely applying modifications to generate lots of meaningless words and text.

Herbal A: 'chodaiin' is 12.5x more frequent than 'oldaiin'
Herbal B: the only case where 'oldaiin' is more frequent (2x), but it's still very much underrepresented ('ol' is the 10th most frequent word, 'cho' does never appear)
Stars B: there are 6 'chodaiin', but zero 'oldaiin'
Astronomical: zero of each
Cosmological: one 'chodaiin', zero 'oldaiin'
Pharma A: equal number of 'chodaiin' and 'oldaiin' (5 each)
Stars A: one 'chodaiin', zero 'oldaiin'
Balneological B: one 'chodaiin', zero 'oldaiin'


(*) And also 'chod' and 'aiin' are rarer than 'ol' and 'daiin'. One could reach 'chodaiin' from 'chol' (which is frequent) + 'daiin', but this would not remove the problem because one needs anyway to add a rule to get rid of the 'l' (and with a certain probability too: 'choldaiin', with the 'l', occours 6 times).