[Article] Testable signatures on VMS structure

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Concretely, we propose 4 criteria that any Voynich script "generator" (like Naibbe) should meet to really look like Voynich. These are necessary criteria, not sufficient ones.

But your criteria are based on features that distinguish Voynichese from four (4) languages - two Western Indo-European ones and two Semitic ones. 

Natural languages are MUCH more varied than that.  There are the East Asian monosyllabic languages, agglutinative languages, languages with vowel harmony like Turkish and Hungarian, languages with definite articles written as postfixes, languages with and without noun inflections for gender and number and noun-adjective agreements, languages with postpositions instead of prepositions...  Then there is sandhi, which may be realized in writing (like "a" changing to "an" in English). 

But a bigger problem is that character statistics depend on the spelling system much more than on the language.  For instance, tones in romanized Chinese may be encoded as diacritics on a vowel, or as a numeric suffix 1-4.  The second choice would radically change the statistics of suffixes...

And, finally, statistics are a property of a text, not of a language.  There is no such thing as "the frequency of 'e' in English" or 'the most common Engish word'.   Someone wrote a whole novel in English without using 'e' even once -- and readers don't notice unless they are told.  In a materia medica the most common word may well be "take" or "cures", and the word "the" may hardly be used... 

All the best, --stolfi