Quote:But that needs to be measured, and one must take into account the fact that there are more similar-looking words in Voynichese than in French or English, and the frequency of use of each word is probably higher since the lexicon is rather small.
Well, we could do such a test but it wouldn't convince you of anything.
There is really a huge lot of vertical patterns in VM. I could invent some formal definition of them and count them in the entire manuscript. It would be a long, tedious and boring job. Then I could do the same for some manuscript in Latin. Then I could do some formal statistical test and compare the results.
But if they were different and VM had more of these patterns you would say it just means that VM has a different structure from my chosen Latin manuscript and nothing more. And VM is most probably not in plain Latin anyway so it is an irrelevant result.
--------------------
And I would like to add some more general observations.
People tried really hard to read VM and haven't read a single word. There are surprisingly few potential cribs and the ones we have aren't working.
Actually we know something. We can safely exclude several possibilities. Voynichese for 99% isn't:
- simple substitution of European language
- simple transposition cipher
- homophonic cipher
- syllabary
- abugida
and possibly several more.
So the options left and usually mentioned are:
1) gibberish
2) nomenclator
3) some megacipher
4) an exotic language
I would also add 5) an exotic language written in cipher or megacipher
If 5) would be true then I am out
I believe we should try in the future to discuss these options and maybe try to prove if some are more possible than others.
But "exotic language" is a solid, concrete bunker with thick walls which is not necessarily a good thing. It is very hard to prove it as proving would basically mean cracking the manuscript but disproving is equally hard.