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“ Zipf’s law was discovered centuries after the accepted date of creation of the Voynich text. Thus, proposed solutions like the use of sixteenth-century cipher

“ Zipf’s law was discovered centuries after the accepted date of creation of the Voynich text. Thus, proposed solutions like the use of sixteenth-century cipher methods, although not impossible, can hardly account for the presence of Zipf’s law in the Voynich text.”

DonaldFisk 6y ago
The constraint the author of the Voynich Manuscript would have been working to is that it had to look at least superficially like a natural language. The bare minimum for that is that the choice of current glyphs depends on the previous glyph, and I think that would have been obvious even at the time the Voynich Manuscript was written. I think that's a necessary (but not a sufficient) property of all alphabetic languages, and suspect it's enough to make the distribution Zipfian. It would be nice to have a mathematical proof or an experimental verification that it's always or nearly always Zipfian. Generating text in that way doesn't require a prior knowledge of Zipf's Law, and I don't think it was unthinkable in the 15th Century.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  It's not unthinkable that it could be the result of a hoax, and I admit that there aren't a lot of examples of documents even remotely like the VM, but I still think that an Occam's Razor approach would rule out a hoax. How likely is it that someone (or even some group) trying to perpetrate a hoax would come up with a method which was not only undetectable by analytical tools available at the time but also by tools that wouldn't be invented even centuries later? I suppose we should compare it to the invention of the Vigenère cipher, in the 16th century, which was only broken in the 19th century. Conversely, we have examples of texts written in forgotten languages which were later translated / remain untranslated, and we don't / didn't assume them to be hoaxes (assuming they obey Zipf's Law). We also have examples of people inventing new written languages for spoken languages that didn't have a (known) written form, so I think Occam's Razor would support the hypothesis that this is what happened with the VM.
  - DonaldFisk 6y ago
    The Voynich Manuscript is a unique document. Nothing else is written in the same script. A few others from the period are encrypted, notably Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber by Giovanni Fontana, but they're trivial to decipher. Only one other I'm aware of has any naked women in baths. For other scripts, there either are numerous texts for each (e.g. Egyptian, Sumerian, Mycaenean Greek, Khitan, Etruscan, Rongorongo), or very few short texts (e.g. Pictish). Not a stand-alone 240 page book. But there are examples of forged documents from the middle ages, e.g. the Gospel of Barnabas and the Donation of Constantine. I tried to decipher the Voynich Manuscript, before discovering that there were other, simpler explanations for its apparent meaningfulness (e.g. the observations described in the Montemurro & Zanette paper): http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html . It's possible it's some kind of verbose cipher devised by someone ahead of his time. It's even possible, though very unlikely, that it's written in a Northwest Caucasian language. I've ruled out other language groups. The approximate adherence to Zipf's Law is telling us something about how the text was produced. When I have time, I might look into whether state machine generated output follows Zipf's Law. I suspect it does generally, and know it does for the text I generated, but I'd like solid proof and it would be another nail in the coffin of the idea it's unencrypted or lightly encrypted text. Or it might not.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      Thank you for that excellent overview. It's interesting that your Principal Component Analysis[0] pointed to a Caucasian language, as did a more recent Hypervector Analysis[1]. How likely is it that a 15th century process for generating meaningless text would not only follow Zipf's Law but also give consistent and plausible results under those analyses? [0] http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html [1] https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid39598 https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid395...

DonaldFisk 6y ago

The constraint the author of the Voynich Manuscript would have been working to is that it had to look at least superficially like a natural language. The bare minimum for that is that the choice of current glyphs depends on the previous glyph, and I think that would have been obvious even at the time the Voynich Manuscript was written. I think that's a necessary (but not a sufficient) property of all alphabetic languages, and suspect it's enough to make the distribution Zipfian. It would be nice to have a mathematical proof or an experimental verification that it's always or nearly always Zipfian. Generating text in that way doesn't require a prior knowledge of Zipf's Law, and I don't think it was unthinkable in the 15th Century.

dane-pgp 6y ago
It's not unthinkable that it could be the result of a hoax, and I admit that there aren't a lot of examples of documents even remotely like the VM, but I still think that an Occam's Razor approach would rule out a hoax. How likely is it that someone (or even some group) trying to perpetrate a hoax would come up with a method which was not only undetectable by analytical tools available at the time but also by tools that wouldn't be invented even centuries later? I suppose we should compare it to the invention of the Vigenère cipher, in the 16th century, which was only broken in the 19th century. Conversely, we have examples of texts written in forgotten languages which were later translated / remain untranslated, and we don't / didn't assume them to be hoaxes (assuming they obey Zipf's Law). We also have examples of people inventing new written languages for spoken languages that didn't have a (known) written form, so I think Occam's Razor would support the hypothesis that this is what happened with the VM.
- DonaldFisk 6y ago
  The Voynich Manuscript is a unique document. Nothing else is written in the same script. A few others from the period are encrypted, notably Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber by Giovanni Fontana, but they're trivial to decipher. Only one other I'm aware of has any naked women in baths. For other scripts, there either are numerous texts for each (e.g. Egyptian, Sumerian, Mycaenean Greek, Khitan, Etruscan, Rongorongo), or very few short texts (e.g. Pictish). Not a stand-alone 240 page book. But there are examples of forged documents from the middle ages, e.g. the Gospel of Barnabas and the Donation of Constantine. I tried to decipher the Voynich Manuscript, before discovering that there were other, simpler explanations for its apparent meaningfulness (e.g. the observations described in the Montemurro & Zanette paper): http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html . It's possible it's some kind of verbose cipher devised by someone ahead of his time. It's even possible, though very unlikely, that it's written in a Northwest Caucasian language. I've ruled out other language groups. The approximate adherence to Zipf's Law is telling us something about how the text was produced. When I have time, I might look into whether state machine generated output follows Zipf's Law. I suspect it does generally, and know it does for the text I generated, but I'd like solid proof and it would be another nail in the coffin of the idea it's unencrypted or lightly encrypted text. Or it might not.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    Thank you for that excellent overview. It's interesting that your Principal Component Analysis[0] pointed to a Caucasian language, as did a more recent Hypervector Analysis[1]. How likely is it that a 15th century process for generating meaningless text would not only follow Zipf's Law but also give consistent and plausible results under those analyses? [0] http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html [1] https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid39598 https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid395...