In the previous post in this series we coyly unveiled the tantalising mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript: an early 15th century text written in an unknown alphabet, filled with compelling illustrations of plants, humans, astronomical charts, and less easily-identifiable entities.

Stretching back into the murky history of the Voynich Manuscript, however, is the lurking suspicion that it is a fraud; either a modern fabrication or, perhaps, a hoax by a contemporary scribe.

One of the more well-known arguments for the authenticity of the manuscript, in addition to its manufacture with period parchment and inks, is that the text appears to follow certain statistical properties associated with human language, and which were unknown at the time of its creation.

The most well-known of these properties is that the frequency of words in the Voynich Manuscript have been claimed to follow a phenomenon known as Zipf’s Law, whereby the frequency of a word’s occurrence in the text is inversely proportional to its rank in the list of words ordered by frequency.

In this post, we will scrutinise the extent to which the expected statistical properties of natural languages hold for the arcane glyphs presented by the Voynich manuscript.

Unnatural Laws

Zipf’s Law is an example of a discrete power law probability distribution. Power laws have been found to lurk beneath a sinister variety of ostensibly natural phenomena, from the relative size of human settlements to the diversity of species descended from a particular ancestral freshwater fish.

In its original context of human langauge, Zipf’s Law states that the most common word in a given language is likely to be roughly twice as common as the second most common word, and three times as common as the third most common word. More precisely, this law holds for much of the corpus, as the law tends to break down somewhat at both the most-frequent and least-frequent words in the corpus