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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Your constructed language scenario ... makes predictions the VMS doesn't satisfy:

A constructed language dictionary produces consistent usage. If "daiin" means "heat," it should appear in consistent semantic contexts. In the VMS, "daiin" appears everywhere — in every section, next to every kind of word. No semantic clustering is detectable.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that, by pure coincidence, is statistically similar in some aspects (like word structure and size distribution) to the VMS text.  The text was not created by me; it was taken from a published and heavily used manual.  It is not encrypted, merely written in a simple but intentionally obfuscated spelling system, using a Latin letter or digraph for each sound.  The word spaces are as in the original.  <%> and <$> delimit parags.  The line breaks, other than parag breaks, were created by "fmt -s -w 50".   

Can you detect any "semantic clustering" of a kind that is not detectable in the VMS? 

A constructed language doesn't show a continuous evolutionary gradient.

I have yet to see evidence that there is a "continuous evolutionary gradient" along the VMS.  Sure, if one sorts the pages of a document in a way that minimizes the distances between consecutive pages in any document, the result will tend to show a continuous gradient.  

On the contrary, all tests that I have seen show that, if one merely separates the pages by section (treating Herbal-A and Herbal-B as two separate sections), what one sees instead is abrupt changes in word frequencies between sections. Like those one sees in any natural language text between sections on very different topics. Or even between sections on the same topic but written by different authors in a different style.

And (as you noted) if the word frequencies change, so will the frequencies of glyphs and digraphs. 

A constructed language doesn't show line-boundary production effects. If words have fixed meanings, their form shouldn't depend on line position. But some words appear almost exclusively at line starts or line ends.

These alleged "line-boundary production effects" have been discussed extensively in the LAAFU thread.  One fact that has been recently pointed out is that in fact one should expect different word frequencies at line-start and line-end, because the probability of breaking a line before any given word greater for longer words, and because in a manuscript document the scribe will be more likely to use abbreviations (like, apparently, m -> iin) near line-end.  

We do not know yet whether these two content-insensitive processes can account for all anomalies seen around line breaks.  And we do not know either whether these are the only content-insensitive processes that can produce those anomalies.  Until these questions are resolved, the line-break anomalies cannot be used as evidence that the VMS text is not natural language.

A constructed language with semantic prefixes doesn't show prefix-suffix independence.

 

And neither does Voynichese: 

  56 otedy 56 oteedy
   2 ytedy 12 yteedy

  12 ched  11 ches               
  10 shed   0 shes

 119 chey  11 ches           
  77 shey   0 shes

  50 dain  30 dair               
  12 rain   2 rair

All the best, --stolfi