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

[Dunsel]

There is still no explanation for how the Author could have created words with those hidden statistical anomalies, both for the seed text and during modification.

I am hesitant to define any Voynich statistics as “hidden anomalies.” Some may simply be emergent structure.  Some of the Voynich statistics are likely the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Fire bullets at a barn and then paint a target around the tightest cluster afterward.

In my own tests, the Zipf-like curve and word-length distribution were not programmed in directly; they arose from the copy/mutate process itself.  Word-length.  Hapax count.  Vocabulary size.  All arose without any effort to specifically code for them. I would expect the same with other statistical patterns. If you dig deeply enough into natural language, or into generated text from a constrained local process, you will find uneven pairings, family clusters, missing combinations, and odd-looking skews.  So the question is not whether anomalies exist. Of course they do. The question is whether they require a hidden semantic lexicon, or whether they can emerge from constrained local copying, reuse, and mutation.

Let alone why a great majority of possible modifications are never made.

No, the manuscript never explored every possible word combination. A realistic copy-mutate system would stay conservative, reusing active word families and nearby variants instead of wandering randomly through all legal forms.  Natural languages work the same way. English could produce far more legal letter combinations than it actually does. And if someone really was trying to create a convincing hoax, making the text feel language-like would be the goal, not splattering every theoretically possible word across the page.  That's gibberish.  Even the ledger I demonstrate shows that thousands of never used combinations could exist. Constraint is why they don't exist. 

These words look English but don't exist.  Humans could have created them, but never did.  In our cases, the necessity wasn't there.  In the Voynich, that same constraint applies whether you think it has meaning or not.

• brathen
  
• cloryn
  
• fenwall
  
• dravick