How fast could a scribe write a Voynich like text?

[magnesium]

It took me approximately 1.5-2 hours to do a rough-draft encryption and also write out Figure 5 in the Naibbe cipher paper, which is 214 tokens long (217 tokens long if you treat each paragraph-inital <p> as standalone). So we're talking about 30 seconds per token on average, including encryption. This scales up to roughly 320 hours of work for a VMS-length text, with modern materials. I expect there would be slowdowns with 15th-century materials—periodically sharpening a quill, for example—but as I got more comfortable with encryption, I moved faster and more confidently and began to memorize specific ciphertext word types, especially for common unigram encryptions. I would expect speed-ups over the course of encrypting a longer document, as the scribe's ability to encrypt from memory increased.

Assuming a scribe worked ~6 hours per day, this would yield a roughly 3-month time estimate for the text. That's broadly consistent with Rugg's (2004) estimate of 2-3 months for making a VMS-length text using Cardan grilles: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

In both cases, there are major benefits to having an external mechanical contrivance help with affix selection: playing cards in the Naibbe cipher's case, Cardan grilles in Rugg's.

Rounding to the nearest word, the gibberish samples collected by Gaskell and Bowern (2022) are 266±84 words long (±1 standard deviation). You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Assuming that each gibberish-writing session was the length of a full class at Yale, which would be either 50 or 75 minutes, then we're looking at 11-17 seconds per token, on average, or roughly 120-180 hours for a full VMS-length text. If the writing session were less time, then the time spent estimates would decrease accordingly.