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

[Dunsel]

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. 

And that is pretty much what I found as well, including the difficulties of modelling the imperfections of human variability. Though my modelling is purely copy, edit distance 1, and rarely 2. I haven't tried combining words yet.

Since you are the authority on this, perhaps you have some thoughts on f1r? I've been using it as the seed, but when I examine it, it already appears to be well into the production system, almost as if there were earlier pages preceding it. My suspicion is that the method itself was already mature before the Voynich was started, and that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. may simply represent an entry point into an already established process.

Also, I should probably say this directly since you are here: it's genuinely an honor to have you look over my work. I was aware of your theories before starting mine, though not your exact methodology, so I hope none of this comes across as me trying to appropriate your ideas. The overlap honestly came from independently chasing the same structural behavior in the manuscript, and your work deserves enormous credit for identifying that local repetition long before I arrived.

Whenever I come to these forums with my work it always feels as if I too am standing on the shoulders of giants.