Re:The Radio-Carbon Dating of the Voynich MS
by mumblemumble on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @11:59AM
(#26003436)
It's not consistent with someone scribbling at random. (See the Codex Seraphinianus for an example of what that looks like.) But some researchers have demonstrated formulaic ways of generating nonsense text with the same kind of characteristics, using methods that were known in the 16th century.
Adding support to that hypothesis is that there is no evidence of any corrections anywhere in the book. If it were real text, you would expect mistakes and corrections. If it were meant to be nonsense, there would also be mistakes, but there would be no particular need to correct them.
I suppose that any sufficiently convoluted random/hoax process could result in a text which had the necessary properties, but it seems unlikely that the hoaxer just happened to have picked a process which was able to convince not just their target market but also generations of statisticians who had not yet been born.
On the other hand, I understand that some of the statistical properties (at the line or page level?) are quite unlike those that are found in known languages, which might be the fingerprint of a process which doesn't preserve meaning, and therefore suggests a hoax.