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

[Dunsel]

The hoax/fraud theories have several problems.

First, even if we assume that the Author used old vellum, the VMS must have been written before 1600.  That was decades before probability theory was invented, and centuries before it was applied to languages.  The Author would not have even imagined what the phrase "like natural language" meant. Even computing character frequencies would have been a hard and unusual task.  So how come the output of his gibberish generation method ended up having all the properties of natural languages that we see in Voynichese -- lexicon size, Zipf-like word frequencies, 10 bits of word entropy, etc?

And the same applies to the intended targets of the fraud.  How could they tell that the text was not "like a natural language"?  So then why would the Author worry about that?

On the other hand, if his intent was to make it look "natural", why did he make Voynichese so unlike European languages?  Even today, when we know that natural languages can be very different from European ones, people will look at those very short words with complex structure, the absence of recognizable articles and prepositions,  the repetitiousness -- and immediately think "gibberish" and "fraud".

Moreover, people rarely imagine things beyond their experience.  An invented language will usually be similar to the languages that the Author knows, even if he tries hard to make it "exotic".  If all the languages that someone knows have polysyllabic words, articles, prepositions, inflections -- his invented language will quite probably have them too.   Edward Kelley, the con man who ruined the life of John Dee, invented an "Enochian language" that was supposedly used by angels in Heaven.  Kelley's "Enochian" turned out to be quite similar to Greek, Hebrew,and other languages that he was familiar with.  Thus, if the Voynichese language had been invented by a Medieval European scholar, it should look like that, too.  

And then there is the question, why would the Author create a book like this? Whether the intent was to sell the book or to impress, he surely would have produced a very different book -- with more figures and less text, with figures suggesting more valuable secrets like turning lead into gold, curing someone from an arrow shot straight though the head, restoring the youth of an elderly person, getting twelve nymphs into one's bed...  

Why would he waste time with the ~25 pages of Quire 20, with boring-looking text and no figures?  

Why would he have so many plants in the herbal sections?  If the "selling point" of the book was that the plants were from a distant land and unknown in Europe, it would not make much difference if the book had 50 or 30 unknown plants, instead of 130+.

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

The method is important if it implies knowledge that was not generally available at the time, or that it was too complicated and cumbersome to use.

All the best, --stolfi

1. “They didn’t know statistics.” - They did not need formal probability theory. Repetitive human copy-mutate behavior can naturally generate language-like statistical structure without mathematical understanding (again, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
   
2. “Why fool people with language-like properties if nobody could measure them?” - Medieval cryptographers absolutely knew what ordinary ciphers looked like, and Voynichese does not resemble a normal substitution cipher or shorthand system. The goal may have been plausibility without easy detection as either plain language or conventional cipher.
   
3. “Why make it unlike European languages?” - Partially true. Again, plausibility without ease of detection may have been the goal. The system may have intentionally avoided looking too much like a known European language while still maintaining internal textual consistency.
   
4. “Invented languages usually resemble known languages.” - Agreed, and this is actually a strong objection to the ‘fully invented spoken language’ theory. Voynichese may be better explained as a generative text system than as a consciously designed language like Enochian.
   
5. “Why make such a huge, labor-intensive manuscript?” - Labor-intensive is relative. The illustrations are fairly simplistic and even the coloring appears hastily applied compared to true luxury manuscripts. If the author had an efficient copy-mutate method, the manuscript may have been producible within a few months — a reasonable investment for possible long-term patronage.
   
6. “Why so much boring text like Quire 20?” - Plausibility. A long dense text section makes the manuscript feel more like a serious scholarly work than a collection of decorative illustrations.
   
7. “Why so many herbal pages?” - Again, plausibility. A large encyclopedic structure increases perceived authenticity and makes the work appear systematic and authoritative rather than small and improvised.
   

Again, I am not saying it IS a hoax.  But, I will say it's plausible.  People love the mysterious.  It's one of the reasons we're all here.  Putting Dee and Kelly aside, Johannes Kepler was a BRILLIANT astronomer during the Renaissance who studied planetary motion.  But, to pay the bills he resorted to Astrology.  He was even skeptical of parts of it, yet still practiced it professionally because patronage systems rewarded it.  He cast horoscopes for patrons and nobility because mathematics and astronomy alone generally did not provide a stable income.

Here's the simple answer. Look at the lengths to which people TODAY go to in order to scam others out of money. I cannot believe that the 15th century was any different in that regard. And that alone tells me that hoax is VERY plausible.  A copy/mutate method could absolutely have accomplished that goal. And if this is the system, then it worked spectacularly. Six hundred years later, we're still arguing about it... and in many ways, still buying into it.