Comment by lolinder

Personally, I have no preference to any theory about the book; whichever it turns out to be, I'll take it as is.

That said, I just watched a video about the practice of "speaking in tongues" that some christian congregations practice. From what I understand, it's a practice where believers speak in gibberish for certain rituals.

Studying these "speeches", researches found patterns and rhythms that the speakers followed without even being aware they exist.

I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but maybe if this was a hoax (or a prank), maybe these patterns emerged just because they were inscribed by a human brain? At best, these patterns can be thought of as shadows of the patterns found in the writers mother tongue?

> would be unlikely to have emerged from someone who was just putting gibberish on the page

People often assert this, but I'm unsure of any evidence. If I wrote a manuscript in a pretend language, I would expect it to end up with language-like patterns, some automatically and some intentionally.

Humans aren't random number generators, and they aren't stupid. Therefore, the implicit claim that a human could not create a manuscript containing gibberish that exhibits many language-like patterns seems unlikely to be true.

So we have two options:

1. This is either a real language or an encoded real language that we've never seen before and can't decrypt, even after many years of attempts

2. Or it is gibberish that exhibits features of a real language

I can't help but feel that option 2 is now the more likely choice.

> consistent with a proper language

There's certainly a system to the madness, but it exhibits rather different statistical properties from "proper" languages. Look at section 2.4: https://www.voynich.nu/a2_char.html At the moment, any apparently linguistic patterns are happenstance; the cypher fundamentally obscures its actual distribution (if a "proper" language.)

Could still be gibberish.

Shud less kee chicken souls do be gooby good? Mus hess to my rooby roo!

If you're going to make a hoax for fun or for profit, wouldn't it be the best first step to make it seem legitimate, by coming up with a fake language? Klingon is fake, but has standard conventions. This isn't really a difficult proposition compared to all of the illustrations and what-not, I would think.

Even before we consider the cipher, there's a huge difference between a constructed language and a stochastic process to generate language-like text.