Speculative fraud hypothesis

[Torsten]

The previous message pointed out that, in the output of their test run, "70% were Voynich words"; implying that the similarity criterion was just that, namely the percentage of words (word instances or word forms, not clear) that were in the VMS lexicon.

The similarity criteria in our work are not based on counting how many word instances also appear in the VMS lexicon—we do not even mention this. Instead, our focus is on reproducing the manuscript’s broader statistical key properties, which we describe in detail in our paper [see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.]. 

If that was the criterion, then the "divergence" (a drop in the similarity as the algorithm progresses) is a problem, because it means that a significant part of the similarity was due to the fact that the seed text had been taken from the VMS.

If you read our paper, you will see that we present a detailed analysis of the Voynich text. Building on this analysis, we introduce a concrete text-generation algorithm—the “self-citation” process—which could have been executed easily by a medieval scribe without any additional tools. We argue that the self-citation method offers the most concise and effective way to account for the features of the Voynich Manuscript.

An experiment by Gaskell and Bowern also strengthens our viewpoint. Gaskell and Bowern recruited Volunteers to write short “gibberish” documents, as a basis for a statistical comparison with the VMS and linguistically meaningful texts. Gaskell and Bowern write "Our results are generally consistent with the proposal of Timm and Schinner that the VMS was generated by a process of “self-citation”: that is, that the VMS scribe(s) generated the text largely by copying or modifying words appearing earlier in the same section". They write further in reference to the self-citation method “Informal interviews and class discussions confirmed that many participants did indeed adopt this type of approach to create their texts, although they generally did so intuitively rather than by developing an explicit algorithm such as that published by Timm and Schinner” [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 8]. ) In my eyes is further noteworthy that Gaskell and Bowern also report “[...] greater biases in character placement within lines and word placement within sections [...]” as the result of their experiment.

Another paper by Bowern and Lindemann further reports the test persons’ motivation for the word repetitions: “We tested this point in an undergraduate class and found that beyond about 100 words, the task of writing language-like non-language is very difficult. It is too easy to make local repetitions [...]” This is an important point, because it clarifies that any scribe creating language mimicking gibberish will sooner or later replace the tedious task of inventing more and more words by the much easier reduplication of existing text (and stick with this strategy) [see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.].