How expensive is a "brute force" approach to decode it? I mean, how about mapping each unknown word by a known word in a known language and improve this mapping until a 'high score' is reached?
Mapping words 1:1 is not going to lead you anywhere (especially for a text that has stood undecoded for so long time)
It kiiiinda works for very close languages (think Dutch<>German or French<>Spanish) and even then.
The challenge (as I understand it) is that the vocabulary size is pretty massive — thousands of unique words — and the structure might not be 1:1 with how real language maps. Like, is a “word” in Voynich really a word? Or is it a chunk, or a stem with affixes, or something else entirely? That makes brute-forcing a direct mapping tricky.
That said… using cluster IDs instead of individual word (tokens) and scoring the outputs with something like a language model seems like a pretty compelling idea. I hadn’t thought of doing it that way. Definitely some room there for optimization or even evolutionary techniques. If nothing else, it could tell us something about how “language-like” the structure really is.
Might be worth exploring — thanks for tossing that out, hopefully someone with more awareness or knowledge in the space see's it!
Maybe a version of scripture that had been "rejected" by some King, and was illegal to reproduce? Take the best radiocarbon dating, figure out who was King back then, and if they 'sanctioned' any biblical translations, and then go to the version of the bible before that translation, and this will be what was perhaps illegal and needed to be encrypted. That's just one plausible story. Who knows, we might find out the phrase "young girl" was simplified to "virgin", and that would potentially be a big secret.
idk
Sadly the radio carbon dating disproved two of my far out theories, which was, 1) The book survived from some earlier 'iteration' of life on the planet, where all plants were simply different. or 2) All planets form the same 'kind' of carbon-based life, and this book was sent/delivered to us by another planet.
Sadly, it's probably just someone's form of "art", and not even "real".
Pecularities in Voynich also suggest that one to one word mappings are very unlikely to result in well described languages. For instance there's cases of repeated word sequences you don't really see in regular text. There's a lack of extremely common words that you would expect would be neccessary for a word based structured grammar, there's signs that there's at least two 'languages', character distributions within words don't match any known language, etc.
If there still is a real unencoded language in here, it's likely to be entirely different from any known language.