Hoaxing statistical features of the Voynich Manuscript

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn a previous article, the first author demonstrated that simple materials and techniques could produce meaningless text of comparable complexity to the text in the Voynich Manuscript, at a speed which made a hoax a feasible explanation. The table and grille method described in that article also replicated the main qualitative features of the text in the Voynich Manuscript. In this article, the authors demonstrate that the same table and grille method can also replicate the main quantitative statistical features of the text in the Voynich Manuscript, namely a distribution of word frequencies that mimics Zipf’s distribution, a symmetrical distribution of word length frequencies, and a non-homogeneous distribution of words and of syllables across a corpus of text produced using this method. The main unusual qualitative and quantitative features of the Voynich Manuscript are therefore explicable as products of a low-technology hoax, with no need to invoke an undiscovered new type of code and/or the presence of meaningful text in the manuscript.