“The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges (1941)

[Koen G]

I read a collection of Borges' stories, including this one, when I was in secondary school. It wasn't assigned reading, but just the kind of thing I liked to read myself. I had a vague recollection of this infinite library as basically a clever expansion of the "monkeys with typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare" idea. But I did not know to what extent it prefigures Voynich research! 

"Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition."

This sounds like the kind of thing we would make up to parody typical Voynich solutions. I wonder what this is based on: purely Borges' idea of what such a library would lead to, or actual behavior he had observed in people at the time.