Coelacanth

I imagine that will be the case many places elsewhere also. Certainly that is in line with my own thinking.

“Mildly interesting” or “greatly depressing”?

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.

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.

2. Ah damn it I’ll fix the link

3. Isn’t 90s web design just the absolute pinnacle?

I don’t believe Voynichese is any known or unknown natural language, and even unusual Romanisation wouldn’t explain the peculiarities of the manuscript text. In my opinion, there are only two likely scenarios:

1) Voynichese is an unknown constructed language

2) Voynichese is highly structured gibberish, created systematically and with great care to mimic the behaviour of real language.

Even if the second is correct, it would be a remarkable achievement for some early 15th century scribes. The amount of linguistic awareness required to create this language-looking gibberish is impressive in itself.

You might be interested in this paper

It’s still completely up in the air, and as I said above: paradoxical. Voynichese doesn’t behave like any known language, and has several problems besides just entropy. On the other hand it obeys Zipf’s Law, and topic analysis indicates the content of the writing varies with the subject matter of the pages, like a real language would.

All evidence suggests it was created in the first decades of the 1400s by several scribes. It would have taken weeks to write, and probably a year to finalize including the illustrations. The materials and labour cost would have been rather expensive at the time. It could still be a hoax, but it’s a very old and elaborate one in that case.

It is, however, incredibly unlikely that the text itself is a natural language. That much is widely agreed among experts. The big question is whether the text contains meaningful information at all. Is it a conlang, an elaborate code or is it a nonsense text generated through a series of rules and mechanisms that merely visually imitates language?

The paradoxical nature of the Voynich is part of its allure. It’s so easy to think it’s “just a hoax”, but then you start looking into it and more and more the hoax theory starts to feel unlikely. Then you start to think “maybe it is a language”, but the more you look into that the less sense it makes as a language with all the strange patterns and rules and behaviors that are so unlike known languages.

It’s a very compelling mystery, it doesn’t surprise me that it has consumed so many people and destroyed quite a few careers.

I’m glad I quit smoking, but I can’t deny I miss smoke breaks.