(17-05-2026, 11:47 PM)Torsten wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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.
I understand that "a scribe imitating visual patterns" can be modeled by listing some specific rules and running some statistical tests to check whether applying these rules can produce something similar to the Voynich MS. But to me this raises two points (would be perfect if this already covered in some of your papers, but it's been a while since I read them, and to be frank I didn't study them deeply, mostly the set up and the conclusions):
1. Matching visual patterns is a much broader process than just modifying words glyph by glyph. The existence of the curve line system may suggest that Voynichese words are visually constrained, and it's possible that the actual self-citation might not work at glyph level at all. For example, maybe it works at stroke level, rearranging strokes according to some rules. Using only glyph-based rules is much easier for testing, but may miss some important part of the visual process. Is it likely that the rules defined using glyph codes may not be a good proxy for how the manuscript was created at all?
To give an example of what I'm talking about, this k m f pattern from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 4x17 sequence could represent some evolution in shapes, with m looking like a mid point transit character of k and f. When a scribe works on modifying and mixing visual patterns, the process may not involve splitting a word glyph by glyph, but rather working on a different arrangement of similar strokes.
2. While it's easy to devise a test that would show that self-citation is possible, how to tell apart self citation as primary text generation method from actual citation, as in using past words to actually refer to the same or similar concepts in the text, especially in the context of a constructed language? To give a specific fictional example, imagine a constructed language where the vocabulary is expanded as needed while writing the text (similar to how a nomenclator would be populated), where new concepts are introduced by modifying words for already existing concepts according to some loose rules (essentially this is not unlike how many Chinese characters work). Suppose the text is talking about heat and denotes heat as daiin. On the next page a word for fire is needed, so we use a loose rule of adding o- for intensification and call it odaiin. Then if we need a word for scorching, but odaiin is already taken, so we pop on some extra disambiguation prefix like qodaiin. While this looks very much like citation, in fact we don't even look at the past pages, to write a new word we just consult the dictionary and if it's not there we add a new entry. Will this produce essentially the same patterns as the self-citation?