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

[dashstofsk]

If this book is a hoax or copy/mutate, someone or some group went out of their way to make it look legitimate.

This is my hypothesis also. The writer wanted to make people believe that this was a rare piece from some distant land where they used a strange alphabet. In order to create the deception he had to give the manuscript a semblance of genuineness, give it some definite structure. Otherwise unstructured random writing would have been quickly dismissed as a fraud. The strange alphabet perpetuates the interest in a way that any local alphabet would not have done. The fact that the manuscript has existed to this day is proof that the writer succeeded.

Today with the assistance of programmable computers we can analyse the text and see something of the way it was done. Humans are not good at mimicking randomness. Psychological tricks have a habit of leading us to make repeats and to reuse text. And we can see this in the writing.

We can only guess how the writer achieved it. Perhaps other people at that time tried to create something similar and failed. And perhaps the writer of the VMS noted those failures and strove to avoid the same mistakes.

For me the actual method is not really important. It is enough to show evidence that the manuscript is artificial, constructed and meaningless.