(26-05-2026, 03:22 PM)Dunsel wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are many works of art I look at and think that's just garbage. Splatter on a canvas. Others see form, pattern. When I look at a Rembrandt, I see huge amounts of constraint in the choice of colors, what brush strokes. If this method I'm proposing is correct, you have to look at it like it's art. Why didn't the scribe choose that word? What constraint kept them from making dein? Was that choice intentional?
Once you look at what they did create instead of what they COULD have created, you begin to realize that that constraint is why it still looks like a language but isn't. And, if I'm right, that constraint has been VERY effective. Wouldn't you say?
Yes, treating it as an art form works nicely, but then there is no reason to invoke copy+mutate at all. This is just automatic writing based on visual patterns, like a special type of doodling.
Either there is a set of a few reasonably simple rules that anyone could use to reliably produce Voynich manuscript-like text, or there is little explanatory benefit in listing these rules. I mean, if they don't explain the process well enough, then no-one can prove this was actually the method used to create the manuscript. A possibility, yes, maybe. A necessity, not at all.
I created a piece of plausible looking Voynichese earlier in this thread without using copy+mutate, but just using my intuition of what Voynichese looks like. Copy+mutate should at least do better to have some advantage over "intuitive doodling/art-like writing" explanation. I think so far all proposed reasonably simple copy+mutate rule sets if followed exactly would produce a text that many people on this forum would immediately recognize as implausible Voynichese.