Harvard physicist's take on the VMS

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Well-defined word structure can be a byproduct of wheels

But any encoding that required use of a physical device would make writing way too slow.  That is a general objection to the gibberish theory: it requires a complicated method, rigorously followed through the whole book -- but then why would the Author go to such trouble?   

he bulk of the text is written using fewer than 23 symbols

That may be true if we count each connected glyph as one letter.  But the various word models strongly suggest that some pairs of glyphs functioned as distinct letters.  Like che, ke, in, iin, and maybe combinations with o/a/y too.   Then the alphabet can easily have more than 23 letters.

I won't go into this because we can't falsify the VMS being a copy of a previous manuscript of East Asian tradition, just as we can't falsify the VMS being written by Wilfrid Voynich using 1900 sources and old materials.

For the purpose of supporting a theory, specific claims like "the Author could have been almost blind" or "the Scribe could have been a teenager" need not be falsifiable, or even likely.  They only need to be plausible -- that is, not too unlikely.

The police may be unable to prove that the suspect came in through the window.  But it is usually enough to shows that the window was unlocked, and thus it was possible for him to enter the house.

Conditional character entropy depends, as you said, on the encoding of text. When contracting the verbosity of Voynichese to match conditional entropies of European texts, the outcome is a shorter text.

My recollection is that the next-character entropy of Voynichese is lower at the start of the word, but remains more or less constant along it; whereas in European languages it drops along the word.  Thus the entropy per word of Voynichese turns out to be the same as that of European languages -- about 10 bits.  Is this wrong?

If that is true, Voynichese may be in fact more efficient (in bits of real information per letter) than European languages.

But even if that is false, it would mean only that Voynichese spelling is not as efficient as those of European languages.   Sure, one can easily devise a more efficient "spelling" that would shrink all Voynichese words to 2-3 Latin letters.  But that would be true of any European language too...

I'm drawing a comparison between the effort of making all the hundreds of nymph drawings, all embellished with headgear and clothes (which thankfully your copyist diligently kept when making the replica on vellum?) versus the amount of text we expect the VMS to contain, were it meaningful.

I don't see how we can have any expectation about the amount of text that it should contain.

The Starred Parags section has about the same number of parags (extrapolating over the four missing pages) and about the same number of words as the Shennong Bencao materia medica.  Which is a real book in a real natural language, highly "meaningful" in any reasonable definition of the word. 

Then again, you have swallowtail merlons on the Rosettes, not East Asian architecture, and European motifs throughout like T-O maps, a cross, possibly the 4 Ages of Man like Koen pointed out, European and not Asian Zodiac...

I am satisfied that the transposition to vellum and illustration happened in Europe, by the hands of an European Scribe, -- who often drew his "inspiration" from European books that were popular among scholars and educated people. 

The Author's draft may have had only some crude sketches of the plants.  In fact I think that Pharma is a somewhat faithful reproduction of the draft, while Herbal may be an expanded version where the Pharma sketches were completed with bogus elements -- perhaps because that is what Europeans expected a Herbal to look like. 

The draft may have had crude sketches of some of the astronomical diagrams and of the tubs/organs/pipes of Bio.  But pretty surely it did not have any nymphs, with or without hats.  It would not make sense.  The draft of each Zodiac page may well have been just a couple lines of text and a list of the 30 labels, and a general instruction "draw 15 30 human figures in two nested circles, each with one of these labels, and write these lines around the diagram". 

All other details of the figures -- all the nymphs and their hairdos, hats, and "star wands", the Zodiac sign icons and their dresses, the merlons on the Rosette page, the missing plant parts, the "stages of life" and "bird catcher" allegorical figures -- would have been provided by the Scribe.  Who, like many Europeans at the time, may well have never been farther than 20 km from his native town.

They actually did [sneak in some European motifs]. y on word boundaries drawn from latin con- and -us, letterforms like ch, r, a, o. [None of which would read out loud like an East Asian language when taken at face value, mind you.

Most Voynichese glyphs are constructed from pairs of simple pen strokes: a left half which is either i or e, combined with one of 5-6 different strokes at right in almost all possible ways. (The only exception seems to be a flipped a, with a straight i left stroke and a flipped e on the right.)  Thus the similarity of some glyphs to Latin letters is a not-at-all-unlikely coincidence. 

Anyway, the way those glyphs are use in Voynichese implies that their phonetic values is not at all like those of the matching Latin letters.  Taking these at face value is a common mistake of beginner voynichologists.

I dispute the implicit comparison of the VMS Gibberish Hypothesis to Flat Earth, for instance, as a fair one.  The latter would require extraordinary evidence, leaps of logic to explain astronomical empirical data and massive, long-time running conspiracy theories to been proven true, whereas the former would not.

Agreed, that is an exaggeration.  But I still put "gibberish" only slightly above "vaccines cause autism".  Not completely impossible, but not nearly likely enough to justify spending my time reading papers who claim it.

All the best, --stolfi