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

[Dunsel]

Here's a very quick preliminary test. In my opinion, the result is acceptable for such a short text.

And you see what I was saying about word length.  You have no 1, 2 or 3 length words so you distribution is way to the right.  Voynich is word length 5 centered, not 6.

Look at this output from my generator:

Output tokens: 8274
Output vocabulary size: 2525
Output hapax count: 1551
Voynich comparison tokens: 8519
Voynich vocabulary size: 2436
Voynich hapax count: 1642

So, your vocabulary is in the ballpark, maybe a little light.  You add those length 1 and 2 tokens and that'll bring up that vocabulary count and likely bring your word length closer to the Voynich if you keep the token count the same.

Now, look at my top 20 bigrams and trigrams compared to the Voynich.  It still needs some tweaking but it's in the ball park.  Is yours?

Code:

Top 20 output bigrams (100 pages):   ho: 2062   ch: 1689   sh: 1551   ai: 1319   ol: 1241   he: 1196   ey: 1037   in: 989   da: 884   ii: 851   ar: 761   or: 626   th: 621   ct: 611   od: 579   hy: 568   ha: 513   cp: 451   ph: 421   ot: 363 Top 20 Voynich bigrams (100 pages):   ch: 3082   ho: 1920   ai: 1433   in: 1374   ii: 1281   ol: 1239   he: 1116   da: 1116   sh: 1033   dy: 1024   hy: 948   ok: 930   or: 922   qo: 764   ot: 749   ar: 562   ey: 554   od: 548   ee: 541   eo: 467 Top 20 output trigrams (100 pages):   sho: 850   aii: 736   hey: 734   cho: 729   hol: 706   iin: 638   dai: 537   cth: 529   cph: 388   she: 362   che: 361   hod: 307   ckh: 259   oda: 252   ain: 249   hoy: 243   dar: 190   cfh: 188   chy: 187   har: 184 Top 20 Voynich trigrams (100 pages):   cho: 1236   iin: 1181   aii: 1139   dai: 728   che: 718   hol: 596   chy: 492   sho: 467   hor: 467   cth: 435   tch: 420   kch: 392   edy: 366   qok: 359   she: 295   hey: 291   ody: 253   qot: 251   otc: 244   heo: 241

Look at my word length compared to the Voynich then compare it to yours.

   

Look at my zipf curve compared to the Voynich. Does yours compare?  I'm betting that until you fix the word length it'll be a "no".

   

These are the the very basic numbers a generator needs to be "plausible" with before you can even call it a generator.  AND, to be a workable generator it has to be mostly blind about it.  I do use a seed page. After that, it generates the rest on it's own just using my ledger.  And all the numbers you see mine generate are emergent.  I didn't create any code to force a zipf curve.  I do have code that manages word length and that's something a scribe could do with their eyeballs.

The big thing you have to think about.  If you sat down and tried to create something that looked like the Voynich and YOU were in the 15th century, what "tools" would you need other than a quill, some ink and maybe some ponce to erase things with.  Any generator we come up with today needs to be human 15th century doable. Which is why the Naibbe cypher looks great and would technically be human doable but would require dice and cards and lookup tables... extremely cumbersome.  Those are the type things you need to consider.  

Creating Voynich-like text is easy.

Creating a method that explains how a 15th century scribe could do it, that's the hard part.

Edit: If you want to really see how you're doing, put up some real Voynich comparison charts, word length for word length.