I'm of the opinion that it's not supposed to make sense. I think it's a sample: a demo herbal void of any valuable content. Its purpose is to showcase the abilities of the author/illustrator and nothing more.
If the sequence of symbols was completely random (biased only by a human desire to make it look like a language, and human inability to be perfectly random) wouldn't that show up in a statistical analysis?
According to [0], "A long succession of (actually pretty good) past statistical studies has revealed that Voynichese has an abundance of mechanisms that give it internal structure, not only in terms of letter adjacency and within words generally, but also within lines, paragraphs, and pages."
Whatever process generated that structure, it seems like it required more work than is necessary to achieve the aim you suggest the writer(s) had.
I didn't say it was random. On the contrary, I'd expect it not to be. As you say, humans are bad at random, so if you told a human to sit down and write nonsense content in a nonsense script, you could probably expect some structure to emerge despite the lack of meaning. The writer might even accidentally inject unintentional interpretations by semi-consciously templating their work off of familiar texts.
Why not just copy sections of the Bible if it's just a sample of work? Why go through the extra effort of creating a new script and possibly a new language just to show how well you can write? Latin would have been the predominate language for manuscripts at this time so writing in Latin would have been a better example of the writer's skills. These kinds of manuscripts took a lot of effort and resources to put together so if someone was just trying to make a portfolio of their work, do you think they would need to produce such a large volume when several pages would have sufficed?
We use Latin in "Lorem Ipsum" because most people are unable to read it today. This makes sure that the viewer focus on the page layout and images and not the text itself.
If it was written in Latin during an era where everyone could read Latin, it wouldn't be the same concept.
> Why not just copy sections of the Bible if it's just a sample of work?
It would probably be a bad idea to juxtapose religious text with the borderline alchemical pictures in the manuscript. People are/were a superstitious lot. Also, you wouldn't want to risk angering the church. Aesthetically it would also be a bad fit, because this (probably?) isn't a Bible. For the type of content on display here, it probably wouldn't do to remind the client of Sin during the pitch.
> [why] produce such a large volume when several pages would have sufficed?
Here's a similar volume of pages with no meaning but to showcase the capability for presenting a particular type of content: https://www.squarespace.com/templates Only instead of Photography, Online Stores, Blogs the categories are Herbal, Astronomical, Balneological, etc.
> Why?
I think we can be fairly certain that whoever produced the Voynich Manuscript was at least a little hmmm... eccentric? We should probably be moderate about how much sense we expect to make from it.
Maybe they were feeling creative? AFAIK many of not all of the plants shown are fictional, so the document being the product of a creative mind seems likely.
It wouldn't be hard to construct a scheme for using the manuscript as an oracle. A single "word" or "sentence" chosen by chance could only be interpreted since it would have no translation.
