Speculative fraud hypothesis

[Torsten]

Consequently, a scribe attempting to generate language-like gibberish would, sooner or later, abandon the laborious task of perpetual invention in favor of the far easier strategy of reduplicating and adapting previously written material — and would ultimately adhere to this approach consistently.

Note my emphasis.  The problem is that the "adapting" is far from a simple step.  Voynichese words have a very restricted structure, so the "adapting" must be random but such that it preserves that structure.  At this point the gibberish generation method is not much easier than generating each word from scratch (as Rugg had proposed), and is totally not "natural".

The modifications in question are not random, nor do they disrupt the underlying word structure. Instead, they follow systematic patterns—most commonly the substitution of one or more glyphs with similar ones. For example, it is considerably easier for a scribe to transform chaiin into shaiin, or daiin into dain, than to invent entirely new word forms from scratch. This process preserves structural consistency while naturally generating the kinds of variation observed in the Voynich text.

Additionally, for a text created by self-citation it appears as a logical assumption that the scribe also used aesthetically motivated design rules for glyph selection, in order to harmonize the overall appearance of the text (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 10).

In fact (if I read you correctly), your justification for your proposed method is that it creates the repetitiousness that you claim to see in the VMS; which is a clue that the text is gibberish. Wouldn't the Author have worried about this last fact?

Paraphrasing your argument: "The VMS text has statistical properties X, Y, and Z, where Z is 'repetitiousnss'.  Here is an algorithm that generates gibberish with properties X, Y and Z. Therefore the VMS must be gibberish."

That is not an accurate representation of my argument. I would kindly ask you to refer directly to my published papers rather than speculate about my position, as they set out the hypothesis and its justification in detail.

How could a "parameterless" Mutate function produce these asymmetric word frequencies?

My hypothesis is directly grounded in the observed word frequencies of Voynichese. The so-called “parameterless” aspect of the self-citation method does not ignore these asymmetries; rather, it seeks to explain them as natural outcomes of the iterative copying and modification process itself, without the need for externally imposed parameters.

See for instance You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 6:

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. Note that most of these "isolated" words can be seen as concatenations of more frequent words (e.g. <polcheolkain>=<pol>+<cheol>+<kain>). This characteristic dependence of token frequency from word similarity is just another manifestation of the long-range correlations that have been uncovered and discussed by several researchers throughout the last decade.