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

[Dunsel]

...
Why then use copy+mutate+ledger at all?

You keep moving into paleography, and that's not what I'm doing here. I'm not a paleographer and would be a fool to claim such. I'm not trying to reconstruct exact medieval pen mechanics or determine whether a specific glyph join should be read as ete, cth, or something else. My work is computational and structural. Data analysis. That's what I do.

Your definition of plausible and mine are obviously very different. You keep bringing up paleography, which is a visual discipline. I work with measurable structure and production behavior. You see plausible as having the same visual appeal. I see plausible as having the same statistical behavior.

If you or someone else wants to improve the paleographic realism of generated output, that's a separate layer of refinement. But pointing out a rare glyph combination in draft generator output does not invalidate the underlying production model any more than a malformed brush stroke invalidates the existence of painting techniques.

I am asking a simple question. Can a constrained generation process reproduce the same large-scale statistical behavior we see in the Voynich manuscript without assuming there's a hidden language underneath it?

And to answer your question:

You criticize my use of a ledger, but then in the code you produced you created this:

COMMON_WORD_WEIGHTS
COMMON_COMBINATION_WEIGHTS
WORD_START_BIGRAMS
BIGRAM_OPTIONS
TRIGRAM_OPTIONS
NONFINAL_TRIGRAMS
FINAL_BIGRAMS
FINAL_TRIGRAMS
WORD_FINAL_SUFFIXES

That is a continuation table. It is doing a ledger walk at the bigram/trigram level instead of the character-adjacency level that mine does.

And your long-word generation is not just random invention. This line:

word += random.choice(allowed_trigrams)[2]

takes the current ending, finds an allowed trigram continuation, and appends the next character. That is constrained copy/mutation behavior.

So I will ask the same question back: why use copy + bigram/trigram mutation at all?

Because unconstrained random generation collapses. I... and now YOU... have just proved that a constrained production system works better than rolling a dice.