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

[rikforto]

Does my generator violate CLS? Yes.  Does that mean the constraint system of my ledger is fundamentally wrong? No. It may mean that, if CLS is correct, then it's not taking the lower level constraint system of CLS into account.

Crucially, however, your ledger, the one we are supposedly talking about, does not address these kinds of "lower-level" constraints. And that quite simply raises questions about the applicability of these findings to the VMS.

I also think you're selling the CLS short. These aren't "stroke habits", but a fundamental observation about how letterform and letter order correlate. With some exceptions---and a good deal of the paper is spent defining those exceptions---letters with a base of e precede letters with a base of i. This kind of ordering of letters is utterly atypical. Cham arguably could have done a better job linking this to the bigram entropy findings, which have amply shown that period manuscripts did not order letters like this, but there are few writings systems where words from one half of the alphabet show up in the former part of the word and the remainder in the latter, and certainly not in European corpora, and I think we can extend his write-up some charity on that score. Even if you think it's just a "stroke habit", it's fair to say a good ledger should account for it, and a fair criticism to note it doesn't.

His conclusion doesn't much matter to the point here, which is that your ledger does not respect the letter-ordering phenomenon. A ledger that does not substantially reproduce letter order is failing to capture one of the more striking parts of Voynichese text