An Artificial Construction

[oshfdk]

The difference between Voynichese and other languages seems to be a matter of degree, not a fundamental one.

I'm not sure what a fundamental distinction would look like in quantitative analysis? Voynichese so far is a clear outlier among all faithful representations of plaintext languages. It actually on the opposite part of the spectrum from Chinese texts you provided (both pinyin and characters) when using this scale. So this is the fundamental distinction of being the top one. When someone presents a sample of any historical plaintext (historical to make sure it's not specifically designed to subvert this test, which maybe is possible using modern computational techniques) that would surpass Voynichese in this metric of maximum independence of token pairs, this will become just a question of degree.

You did  a test with artificially misspelled English, and it did make English look more Cartesian, correct?  Perhaps the amount of errors in Voynichese is more than what you assumed?

Yes, this would work. The only caveat is that the text would probably become unrecoverable, because it appears that more ~30% error rate is needed to replicate the statistics of Voynichese. And surely if it has this kind of error rate any attempts of matching it with existing plaintexts are futile. Also I think that systematic mistakes, like misspelling 'man' as 'men', won't affect the results that much, some actual randomness is required.

And yet another possible explanation is that the VMS may be a terse style of prose which omits most function words and violates syntax for the sake of brevity.  That is, instead of

• "Goblin's Carrot is a tall bush that grows on the mountains. Its bark, made into a tea, will cure baldness and increase one's chance of picking up girls at the tavern"
  

it may say

• "Goblin carrot: tall bush; mountain. Bark tea: bald head, girls"
  

except that without any punctuation, of course.  Then one will see many pairs like "bush mountain"  and "tea bald" that would not occur in a normal grammatical text.

As far as I can see, this specific change would rather skew the results in the opposite direction. To make the results Voynichese-like both "tall bush" and "bush tall" should appear roughly the same number of times, since their expected co-occurrence is the same. This terse technical style would probably make one of them greatly underrepresented. Edit: on the other hand, it's actually hard to predict how certain styles would affect the outcome, since very predictable patters would just get merged into a single token. I'd say it's not very clear what the result of this style would be. Isn't it roughly the style of SJB? Then it's very different from Voynichese.

And this possibility brings up another point: when comparing Voynichese with other languages, one must use texts that are hopefully in the same style.  That is, the Herbal section should be compared to herbals, the Starred Parags section should be compared to a book of recipes (or whatever one guesses that it may be), etc.  And even then there is a huge range of styles...

My claim is that a faithful representation of any natural language in any style won't reach the levels of Voynichese. Especially repetitive texts like recipes or encyclopedias. They are most likely a step in the wrong direction. If anything, maybe some fancy experimental prose might close the gap, like authors that start each word in a sentence from a different letter or similar experiments making the text much less predictable. Also maybe simple word lists, like a shopping list or a list of names, might work. Or not, because if the text gets too unpredictable, this will first and foremost lead to shorter tokens and intraword letter combinations would begin to dominate the chart.