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Of all the Voynich theories, I find those suggesting it was produced through a mechanistic method to be most persuasive. Several statistical properties of the w

Of all the Voynich theories, I find those suggesting it was produced through a mechanistic method to be most persuasive. Several statistical properties of the words just don't match up with any natural languages, and there is a large amount of repetition of individual words with small variations, but hardly any repeated phrases. One recent idea is that successive words were copied from early ones, with small rearrangements of the glyphs https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6639.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6639.pdf . As such, the text gains the characteristic of looking like a language, when in fact it is meaningless gibberish. Possibly this was done as way of fooling somebody rich to buy it; at some point it came into the possession of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, and was clearly a very desirable artifact even in the 17th century.

GnarfGnarf 7y ago
The "hoax" is a tempting hypothesis. There were many suckers who would have paid big bucks for a mysterious manuscript. But... how would a medieval forger know about linguistic patterns of natural languages, that weren't discovered until centuries later? The Turkish guy's hypothesis sounds like the most plausible.
- sterlind 7y ago
  Hoax should be the hypothesis of last resort. If you have a theory that Voynich is written in a specific cipher or language, you can test it via internal consistency, reconstruction, cognates or sound laws. Statistically, Voynich has morpheme distributions typical of spoken language. Someone could have generated the text from a random distribution or method, but that's a non-falsifiable hypothesis.. given some statistics you can always generate such a trivial theory