[Movie] This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

[Torsten]

• 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.
  
• A single network of similar word forms: Monosyllabic languages have such "networks of similar forms" because of the fixed structure of the syllables
  
• Absence of semantic categories (e.g., nouns vs. verbs): Like most East Asian languages.
  
• No identifiable function words: Like most East Asian languages.
  

For an answer see Timm & Schinner 2019: "Typical for this language family are monosyllabic words and tones to differentiate between various meanings. Omitting the diacritical markers (that redefine the pronunciation), a text written in Vietnamese script will indeed contain many (similar) short words, also resulting in a single network. But even then this network is substantially different from that one representing the VMS: multiple word clusters in contrast to the homogeneous VMS-network.
Additionally, in Vietnamese (like all languages) there will be frequent words distributed equally over the entire text, the so-called function words (like conjunctions, articles etc.). They do not appear contextual, but rather serve to implement grammatical structures, and they normally do not have co-occurring similar words of comparable frequency. In the VMS frequently used tokens differ from page to page. With the exception of repetitive prayers or poems, words in natural languages are chosen because of their meaning, and not of their similarity with previously written words." [Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 4f]

• 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.
  

Language, by definition, is a system for conveying information, and word order is one of the primary mechanisms for signaling relationships between words — such as who is doing what to whom.

Even languages with flexible word order still rely on:

• Preferred or default orders (e.g., Subject-Verb-Object in English, Subject-Object-Verb in Japanese).
  
• Morphological markers (like case endings) to compensate for word order flexibility.
  
• Discourse patterns, where word order reflects emphasis or focus rather than grammar alone.
  

This also holds true for East Asian languages. See for instance these articles about You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 

• Deep correlation between frequency, similarity, and spatial proximity What do you mean, precisely?  Those terms can describe normal features of texts in natural languages.
  

For an answer see Timm & Schinner 2019: "The global VMS graph, as well as the corresponding sub-networks for individual folios, give more evidence for a fundamental connection between token frequency, number of similar tokens, and position within the text. ... The respective frequency counts confirm the general principle: high-frequency tokens also tend to have high numbers of similar words. This is illustrated in greater detail in Figure 3: "isolated" words (i.e. unconnected nodes in the graph) usually appear just once in the entire VMS, while the most frequent token <daiin> (836 occurrences) has 36 counterparts with edit distance 1." [Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 6]

• 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".
  

See for instance You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Schinner demonstrated that the probability of the occurrence of a similar word decreases with distance:
"Interpreting normal texts as bit sequences yields deviations of little significance from a true (uncorrelated) random walk. For the VMS, this only holds on a small scale of approximately the average line length; beyond positive correlation build up: the presence/absence of a symbol appears to increase/decrease the tendency towards another occurrence." [Schinner 2007, p. 105].

• 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.
  

For an answer see Timm & Schinner 2019: "It is possible to distinguish Currier A and B based on frequency counts of tokens containing the sequence <ed>. The summary in Table 2 shows, e.g., that if <chedy> is used more frequently, this also increases the frequency of similar words, like <shedy> or <qokeedy> | in conformity with our previous analysis concerning frequency versus similarity. At the same time, also words using the prefix <qok-> are becoming more and more frequent, whereas words typical for Currier A like <chol> and <chor> vanish gradually. Now, reordering the sections with respect to the frequency of token <chedy> replaces the seemingly irregular mixture of two separate languages by the gradual evolution of a single system from 'state A' to 'state B'."

   

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

I disagree. The Voynich text clearly responds to its physical container — the manuscript page. This suggests the text was generated during the act of writing, not copied mechanically from a pre-existing source. The scribe would need to actively choose, at minimum, the words at the end of each line to ensure that the text consistently fits neatly within the available space. That level of precise layout control isn't possible if the text was fully predetermined elsewhere.

• Context-dependent self-similarity: Again, it is quite possible that a meaningful text in any language would have this feature.
  

See Timm & Schinner 2019: "all pages containing at least some lines of text do have in common that pairs of frequently used words with high mutual similarity appear. The exact cooccurrences may vary: there are pages where <daiin> is paired with <dain>, but also pages where it is frequently used together with <aiin> (f41v, f46r, f55v, f89v2, v105v and f114r) or <saiin> (f2r, f16r, and f90r2)." [Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 3]. This is a consistent feature observed across all pages of the Voynich Manuscript.
See also Timm 2016: "In natural languages a word normally (cf. poems) is used because of its meaning and not because it is similar to a previously written one. The result that the words are arranged such that they co-occur with similar ones is therefore not compatible with a linguistic system. An English text with similar features would mainly consist of words similar to the words 'the', 'and' and 'to'. Additionally, a word "the" would co-occur with words like 'khe', 'phe', 'fhe', 'tha', 'tho', 'thy', 'thee' and 'theee'." [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.]