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

[Dunsel]

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

In order to map the basic statistics of the Voynich, those lower level constraints are mostly irrelevant. If I want to produce a word length distribution, I don't need to know which hand the scribe held the quill in. IF I were telling you that I can exactly reproduce the Voynich, then I better have some pretty amazing details that may even go down to the stroke level. I am not saying that at all.  

I don't think I'm selling anything short. There are issues with his interpretation and in the world of science, charity is not something to be handed out. Yes, he did a lot of good work on the Voynich and he's providing tables that are images, but he's not providing the data. None of the code he used or created is available for me to independently come to the same conclusions. I can't run any of those tests.  I'd have to guess.  His solution for describing his math is to point me to a Wikipedia page. Now, I am not saying he's wrong. What I'm saying is, that to convince me that it's something I need to consider for my ledger, he needs to provide much better proof. 

And I have done a lot of work on the Voynich. But I'm not using logical fallacies to try to convince you of what I'm suggesting. Instead, I'm giving everyone access to the exact data and code I used to produce the results. Download it, test it, you don't like the results, there's tons of knobs to turn and see if you can get better results. Still not happy?  Shove my code into to Codex and create your own generator. You think CLS is valid?  Fine, shove some code into my generator to emulate it and see what happens.  If you manage to produce perfect Voynich, great! I'll be happy with that result. But until he produces some code that explains how those words are put together, I'm not going to try to guess at his methods.

And my ledger does honor LEGAL letter ordering based on what's in the Voynich. No, it is not perfect.  I am not trying to produce a "striking" result.  If I had a striking results, I wouldn't be on here, I'd be talking to a publisher.  What I'm trying to produce is a plausible STATISTICAL result.