The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[kckluge]

the rules for breaking Latin words into syllables are straightforward

Not really: there are some difficulties especially if you use medieval Latin without phonetic distinction of v/u, i/j and exceptions to the basic rules if you want to do it right, like prefixes that you're not supposed to break so you need to check the etymology...

OK, *relatively* straightforward. Certainly compared to (say) English. Code was based on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Yes, I recognize that the results of that code won't be 100% correct because there are subtleties in applying those rules.

the total number of possible syllables is relatively limited

I estimate it to 800-1000 in long texts (without many exotic words), more than double what Mandarin has (~400).

Latin text used was an excerpt from Bacon's _Opus Majus_, Bk 4, beginning "postquam manifesta est necessitas". 

Zipf's Law fit to 300 most-frequent "words" (Latin syllables): ln(freq) = -0.968299 * ln(rank) + 3.637783. 777  types, 24895 tokens, 18.79% hapax,  type/token ratio = 0.03121

All of which is getting into the weeds. The point is that *if* Voynichese were a cipher that breaks up words into smaller chunks, the process that breaks them up is unlikely to be syllabification (and likely isn't deterministic in general?) due to the extremely low TTR that results.