Could the Voynich Author Be a "Ramanujan-style" Anomaly?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Of course, these are all assumptions, and I can’t prove it... But at the very least, this is a reminder that sometimes you need to doubt. Even your own words  

Well, I am quite convinced that it is not encrypted and not gibberish, for the reasons you know.  But I will try to put that aside those reasons for the moment and keep discussing other arguments against it being encrypted.

Both are rather laborious to encode and decode.

2). VMS is hardly some kind of fairy tale. It’s unlikely that the text spanning 200 pages is coherent. The maximum is Quire 13 and Pharma

 

I agree that each page of Herbal, Astro/Cosmo, and Zodiac is almost certainly an independent unit of meaning that would and could be read directly without necessarily reading any other page.  I even think that the same hold for Pharma -- since that section seems to be mainly a list of plants with names, and the text of each paragraph is probably  something like "the plants above are generally good for X Y and Z"  -- hence independent of the other parags and other pages.

However, Bio/Balneo is clearly a continuous text, not a set of separate entries to be accessed in random order.  There are no section headers or marginal notes that would tell the reader where he should start reading to get the information he needs.  

Thus I stand by the objections I posted before.  A complex encryption is unlikely because it would make the book to hard to read. There seems to be no good reason to encrypt the whole book.  Encryption would very likely destroy the "natural-language-like" statistics like Zipf law, vocabulary size, entropy per word.

There are a few examples of whole books being encrypted, but in the cases I know there are good reasons for the encryption, which do not seem to apply to the VMS.

• The Copiale Cipher has the rituals of a Masonic-like secret society that was persecuted at the time, and for which the fun of belonging was mainly in it being secret.
  
• The Rohonc codex, according to Rafal, is not really encrypted, but rather a transcription of some deaf sign language.
  

Are there any examples of an encrypted manuscript book from that epoch with contents and illustrations similar to those of the VMS?                                                                                                                                                       
Of course these arguments are not proof, but make encryption rather unlikely.  On the other hand, the word length statistics and word structure make you-know-which alternative more likely...

All the best, --stolfi