A One-Page Ledger Method for Generating Voynich-Like Text

[Torsten]

What would happen if some artist is given a few lines of Voynichese as a sample and then asked to continue the pattern in a similar visual style. What would the result look like? Will it be worse or better than other proposals for generating meaningless Voynichese.

That's exactly what self-citation is — a scribe looking at existing text and continuing the pattern in a similar visual style. The "artist extending visual patterns" IS the scribe copying and modifying visible words.

You produced plausible-looking Voynichese by imitating known patterns. No cipher, no language, no encoding — just visual imitation. That's self-citation performed by you from memory. The medieval scribe did the same thing from visible source text on the desk in front of him. The difference is that you work from remembered patterns while the scribe worked from visible text — which is why the scribe's output shows stronger spatial clustering and source-word relationships than memory-based imitation would.

The question is what happens if you write more than a few words? You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (2022) tested exactly this. They asked untrained volunteers to produce language like text without semantic meaning — and the output converged on statistical properties similar to the VMS. The structure emerged naturally, without rules, without algorithms, without understanding. Just humans doing what humans do: copying and modifying what they see.

Bowern and Lindemann wrote: "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 [...]" [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 289]. "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). [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.] It might be easy to write a few words of invented text, but writing a whole book of over 37,000 words inevitably drives the scribe toward copying and modifying what is already visible on the page — simply because copying is more efficient than inventing.

So, my main question about copy and modify methods - why bother? What's the advantage of writing down some specific rules and then adding more and more complexity, when just asking a scribe to imitate existing script and making sure that curves mostly start and sticks mostly follow (and don't mingle) produces the same result?

Because formalizing the process lets you test it. You can't test "a scribe imitating visual patterns" — it's too vague. You can test "a scribe copying visible words and modifying them by substituting similar glyphs" — it makes specific, falsifiable predictions about word networks, spatial clustering, frequency-connectivity correlation, and positional effects.

That is the purpose of the Timm & Schinner 2020 paper: "After all, the original VMS was not created by a computer program; the scribe had complete freedom to implement random personal aesthetic preferences, spontaneous impulses, or even idiosyncrasies. The scope of this work is not the 'elemental deconstruction' of the VMS to an exact (and complete) set of rules. We rather demonstrate the feasibility to algorithmically create a text as rich and complex as the VMS, using the strikingly simple self-citation method. As we will show in the following section, this generated text still is able to reproduce all the intriguing statistical key properties of the original VMS" [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 11].

The rules themselves are simple — copy a word, 1) replace one or more glyphs by similar ones, 2) add or remove a prefix, 3) combine two source words to create a new word [Timm & Schinner 2020, p. 9]. The complexity comes from the human applying them. A human mind brings individual preferences formed during years of experience. Because of the scribes concept of language he preferred words of a certain length. Because of his concept of aesthetics he added paragraph-initial gallows and preferred certain glyph combinations while avoiding others. Because of the limitations of the writing material he had to shorten words at the end of lines. Because of the limitations of the copying process all words are more or less connected to each other. These preferences don't need to be formalized as rules — they emerge naturally from a human producing text. That is why any algorithm approximating this process will always be imperfect: it captures the mechanism but not the full human variability. The imperfection of the simulation doesn't mean the mechanism is wrong — it means the model is simpler than the scribe who wrote the Voynich text: "The VMS was created by a human being with all freedom to spontaneously make and break (intuitive or explicit) own rules. After all, from the viewpoint of complexity theory, most likely the minimal representation of the VMS is the manuscript itself” (Timm & Schinner 2024, p. 319).