this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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Mildly Interesting

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The Voynich Manuscript May Be a Hoax (www.youtube.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat to c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world
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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.