Voynich Manuscript/Answer/ANS0D8FZYWJ27TF

A list-like text: recipes, index, glossary

Ruled out failed its test

The plaintext is a list-like text (recipes, an index, a glossary, a star catalogue), whose items carry little word order, so that the manuscript's weak word order is a property of the genre rather than of the encoding.

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answers	Is it a natural language?	QST08JG27P80HMJ
against (from)	Latin list genres (recipes, indexes, glossaries) are more ordered and more formulaic than…	EVD0D8GDR1R1MWN
tests (from)	List-genre comparison (Latin Library texts): order gain (bits/word) of six Latin list-genre texts vs the…	RUN0D8EPW684HZ6
tests (from)	List-genre comparison (Latin Library texts): order gain (bits/word) of six Latin list-genre texts vs the…	RUN0D8EPWXP4FNS

Kind: hypothesis
Stage: tested
Tests: ["T17-lists"]
Family: LANG
Origin: abductive
Result: At matched lengths the manuscript gains 0.27-0.37 bits per word from order and loses 0.13-0.16 bits on held-out pages when the previous word is used. Apicius (recipes) gains 2.32 / +0.91; Pliny's index 2.54 / +1.37; Cato 1.40 / +0.51; Hyginus 1.22 / +0.64; Isidore's glossaries 0.63-0.78 / +0.08-0.31; Pliny's prose 0.59 / +0.05; the Vulgate 1.45 / +0.65. Repeated 4-word phrases: 61-313 in the recipe, index and star texts, 6-18 in the glossaries and prose, 0-1 in the manuscript. The list genres are more formulaic than prose, not less; the nearest Latin genre by order gain is the encyclopedic glossary, and it still differs in sign on the held-out test.
Predictions: ["Latin texts of those genres show word-order gains and held-out bigram gains near the manuscript\u0027s at matched length", "and repeat phrases as rarely"]
Ledger status: not-supported

In the research Session 7: Phase 3: procedures, fragments, lists, transliteration; book v1.2Proposed

History

v1 · 25 Oct 2026 · Voynich Manuscript: sync from the research ledger

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