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

[Dunsel]

I prefer to analyze the text the scribe actually wrote rather than speculate about the texts he didn't write — since that number is endless.

I will politely disagree with this statement. A model does not just have to explain what the scribe wrote. It also has to explain why the text did not fall apart into garbage.  A lot of objections in these discussions are really variations of “why don’t we see this?” or “why didn’t the scribe do that?” They are questions about constraint.

In my own experiments, most copy/mutate systems fail pretty quickly unless the constraints are tight enough. They drift, bloat, repeat badly, or start producing obvious nonsense. And, given enough generations, even my generator has issues. That failure is informative. It tells us the Voynich text is not just “anything goes” mutation. So I think the unwritten text matters too. If a proposed method could easily generate endless bad Voynichese, then we need to explain why the manuscript consistently avoided doing exactly that.

If we don't explore the possibilities of what wasn't created then we'll never have acceptance for what is created.