Has it been mathematicaly determined that the Voynich Manuscript is not gibberish?

Question

A post on the CthulhuTech forum makes the following claim about the Voynich Manuscript:

Actually doing abit of digging and the view is very spilt those who feel its a cipher of some kind have shown mathmaticly that its not gibberish. But it can be argued its possible (but would require masses of work esp. without calculaters ) to make something that would work (but there is no proof that the required knowledge existed at that point that it is belived to have been made.

What analysis was done to "prove" the manuscript is a legitimate cipher script, and how can such an analysis discern between a real cipher and carefully crafted "gibberish"?

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Addendum--brief background:

The Voynich Manuscript is a handwritten book of about 240 pages believed to have been created in the early 15th century. It has been generally assumed to be a cipher text, but the author and purpose of the book are completely unknown. In 2009, researchers at the University of Arizona used carbon dating to confirm that the vellum pages date between 1404 and 1438. Additionally, the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago determined that the ink was "not added in a later period." This enforces the theory that the document is not an anachronistic hoax, but does not prove that the script contains a decipherable message.

A PDF presentation by Kevin Knight, Information Science Institute, University of Southern California, provides additional historical background of the document and an overview of some cryptanalysis that has been done on the document in an attempt to decipher the script. The analysis reviews patterns of individual symbols and patterns of whole words, which are inconclusive.

For more background refer to the Wikipedia entry, the Kevin Knight presentation, the WikiBooks entry, or google "Voynich Manuscript".

Answer 1

Rather the opposite, in 2004 a breakthrough was made in how such a manuscript could've been generated with such apparent linguistic regularity yet actually be gibberish by Dr. Gordon Rugg at Keele University:

'The manuscript exhibits so much linguistic structure that a hoax appears to require almost as much sophistication as an unbreakable code,' says Rugg in his paper.

But now the computer expert and his team believe they have found the secret of the Voynich manuscript.

They have shown that its various word, which appear regularly throughout the script, could have been created using table and grille techniques. The different syllables that make up words are written in columns, and a grille - a piece of cardboard with three squares cut out in a diagonal pattern - is slid along the columns.

The three syllables exposed form a word. The grille is pushed along to expose three new syllables, and a new word is exposed.

Rugg's conclusion is that Voynichese - the language of the Voynich manuscript - is utter gibberish, put together as random assemblies of different syllables.

In 2007 Dr. Andreas Schinner at Johannes Kepler University did further analysis, published in the journal Cryptologia, reaffirming the possibility:

In this article, I analyze the Voynich manuscript, using random walk mapping and token/syllable repetition statistics. The results significantly tighten the boundaries for possible interpretations; they suggest that the text has been generated by a stochastic process rather than by encoding or encryption of language

The only thing that will forever prove it is a hoax is to find documentation of the actual generating tools used - and if it was a hoax, these were very likely destroyed shortly after producing the book. Likewise, the only thing that will forever prove it is not a hoax is to find a translation that is not obviously contrived - whatever that may mean.

However, it is definitely not known to not be a hoax.

Answer 2

No. The corresponding episode of the very listenable Sceptoid podcast gives a nice discussion of this topic.