[Article] [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis

[Torsten]

It is so simple. Confoliate and conjoint correlation compliments this scenario nicely and the conclusion of this investigation should not surprise any hoax hypothesist.

Indeed, the bifolium-level production pattern — the scribe writing sheet by sheet, with inside facing pages most similar because they were visible together — is expected for the self-citation method. Every time the author starts a new (empty) page it is useful to use another page as source. There are indications that the scribe preferred the last completed sheet for this purpose. One peculiarity for the words used seven or eight times is that they often appear on subsequent pages (see Timm 2014, p. 16).

The objection that the scribe would need linguistic sophistication and a complicated method doesn't hold. Mary D'Imperio of the NSA described the mechanism in 1978: "The scribe, faced with the task of thinking up a large number of dummy sequences, would naturally tend to repeat parts of neighboring strings with various small changes and additions." Gaskell and Bowern (2022) confirmed this experimentally: when they asked volunteers to produce meaningless text, many independently adopted exactly this approach.

And also a recent YouTube experiment (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) demonstrates the same point from a different angle. Nearly 200 volunteers were asked to produce pure gibberish — either by keyboard smashing or by inventing fake words. Both strategies produced Zipfian frequency distributions. The presenter's conclusion: "passing Zipf's law doesn't prove it's a real language. It just proves a human wrote it." The volunteers weren't trying to mimic language — their cognitive constraints (repetition bias, mental fatigue) result in the statistical patterns we see in the Voynich text.

No linguistic knowledge or deliberate engineering is needed. Self-citation is the natural human response to the task of filling pages with text-like content.