showing statistical regularity in it that’s of a type that wouldn’t exist if it was statistical random gibberish (which many people have tried and failed to do).
I don’t quite follow you here as several people have demonstrated in various ways that the Voynich manuscript text does not at all conform with random gibberish. In fact, the highly regular and peculiar (often repetitive) structures of it is part of the problem. Now, that doesn’t mean it contains meaningful information, or indeed that it is a language at all. In fact those rigid and repetitive structures that distinguish it from random noise also make it incompatible with known natural human languages.
It could (and most likely is) simply be highly structured, deliberate and constrained nonsense, devised by a semi-random process following a complex algorithm. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that the semi-random part somehow hides encoded information, though with the number of distinguished codebreakers who have had a crack at it I am skeptical. It would also be a highly sophisticated form of cryptography for 15th century Europe.
I don’t quite follow you here as several people have demonstrated in various ways that the Voynich manuscript text does not at all conform with random gibberish.
Yeah, you’re right, I wrote my language backwards. I just fixed it. “You could certainly disprove that it was a real natural language by showing statistical regularity in it that’s of a type that would only exist if it was statistical random gibberish” is what I meant.
I mean, the statistical properties that set Voynichese apart from natural languages are very widely documented. The very low entropy is perhaps the largest issue, playing into the repetitive nature of it and creating “loops” as per this video (elaborated on in this blog post)
Even then though, we can never prove a negative. It’s impossible to prove it’s not a natural language, we can only demonstrate that it works in ways that are completely different from all other known languages.
I don’t quite follow you here as several people have demonstrated in various ways that the Voynich manuscript text does not at all conform with random gibberish. In fact, the highly regular and peculiar (often repetitive) structures of it is part of the problem. Now, that doesn’t mean it contains meaningful information, or indeed that it is a language at all. In fact those rigid and repetitive structures that distinguish it from random noise also make it incompatible with known natural human languages.
It could (and most likely is) simply be highly structured, deliberate and constrained nonsense, devised by a semi-random process following a complex algorithm. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that the semi-random part somehow hides encoded information, though with the number of distinguished codebreakers who have had a crack at it I am skeptical. It would also be a highly sophisticated form of cryptography for 15th century Europe.
Ah damn it I’ll fix the link
Isn’t 90s web design just the absolute pinnacle?
Yeah, you’re right, I wrote my language backwards. I just fixed it. “You could certainly disprove that it was a real natural language by showing statistical regularity in it that’s of a type that would only exist if it was statistical random gibberish” is what I meant.
I mean, the statistical properties that set Voynichese apart from natural languages are very widely documented. The very low entropy is perhaps the largest issue, playing into the repetitive nature of it and creating “loops” as per this video (elaborated on in this blog post)
Even then though, we can never prove a negative. It’s impossible to prove it’s not a natural language, we can only demonstrate that it works in ways that are completely different from all other known languages.