The Voynich Ninja

The Voynich Manuscript: A Non-Stochastic Glossolalia
Joseph Fasano, Manhattanville University

Abstract: The mysterious fifteenth-century Voynich Manuscript has defied all attempts at a
“decoding” since its (re)discovery in 1912. Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, and all manner of
prominent figures have been theorized as its potential author(s). Attempts to understand the
Voynich script [VS] have largely focused on the decoding of a cipher, with the assumption that
VS is an encoded natural or constructed language. Those who reject the possibility of VS being
such a cipher have tended to dismiss it as “meaningless,” or “fake,” or “gibberish,” perhaps
‘simply’ the random outpourings of a glossolalia. However, this latter position has precluded the
robust study of another possibility. Through analysis of the ‘linguistic’ properties of glossolalia
experiences [GEs], this paper proposes that the unique linguistic properties of the Voynich script
are precisely the salient properties of GEs, and that therefore VS is a GE—perhaps the grandest,
most expansive, and most sustained ever preserved.

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Is this a draft or is it already published?
I'm looking for Timm's reference without success.

I found the answer

Ok, that is a pretty interesting paper.

I find it strange that they don't mention the possibility that the vms is a cypher in their opening paragraph, leading them to conclude that it must be a hoax/glossolalia. Unless they count cyphers under natural language or constructed language, which makes little sense to me, since cyphers don't have the same characteristics as natural languages. Also, having a few of the statistic properties of glossolalia doesn't discount the possibility of it being a cypher or having some meaning, even if it's hidden in the form of code or steganography.

My second criticism is that they make several unjustified assumptions about the text, such as that each voynich letter is a plaintext letter/phoneme, which is not necessarily the case. Especially for 'f', which might not be phonetic at all because of how it's usually only on the first line of paragraphs (which they don't mention in the paper). Additionally, the h2 value of voynichese is entirely dependent on the transcription used, and some transcriptions even have a higher h2 than european languages. So the statistics of the text are only similar to glossolalia if you use Eva, which is unlikely to be an accurate transcription of the text's phonemes.

(03-06-2024, 05:39 PM)cecilp Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.some transcriptions even have a higher h2 than european languages.

Which transcriptions??? It can be done by increasing h0 (i.e. the number of different characters) as in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. but I don't remember seeing a transcription (transliteration) that does enough grouping of common patterns to make h2 higher than 3.

I agree this is interesting but I also agree there are some signficant issues.  

1.  This paper has not been peer reviewed.  Here is what the "about" page of the Semantics Archive says about "archiving" a paper.

Publication Status and Citations – Archiving a paper is not considered a form of publication. It is, instead, analogous to circulating a manuscript, preprint, or offprint. Because of this, it is inappropriate to include a link to a paper appearing in the Semantics Archive in a list of references in a publication.

2.  The author has not provided any means to contact him in this publication.  This is always a red flag.

3.  The References list is missing citations.  May be a minor point but revision is certainly needed to be equivalent to a published article.

4.  There is no mention of peer-reviewed Voynich publications that could be a problem for this theory (e.g. Lisa Fagin Davis' work on scribes comes to mind first).  Given the relatively small amount of academic publications on the Voynich there is a feel that publications may have been selectively cited.

5.  There is very little attempt to fit this theory into the time period of the manuscript's carbon dating.  Granted, this is mentioned as future work but this is a really big missing feature that has to be taken into account in order to make this convincing.  The conclusion is very strongly written without a pretty basic premise even attempted -- that glossolalia was culturely appropriate for this time period.  It may take collaboration to get this truly investigated but for me to be convinced there has to be some attempt in this direction.

6.  The text analysis seems superficial and observational based.  It would be more impressive if he had worked collaboratively with someone that could do the computer text analysis in a more solid (quantitative) way.  I also have the same concerns about using EVA as mentioned by cecilp for this kind of work especially in relation to comparison to transcriptions of oral expression.  Basically we've got two made up systems created for very different reasons being compared to each other.  That being said, matching patterning could be impressive -- if a way to really quantify it is figured out.

So these are my thoughts and I do hope the author does the collaborative work to help close these (pretty big) holes in the theory.

(03-06-2024, 05:39 PM)cecilp Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the h2 value of voynichese is entirely dependent on the transcription used, and some transcriptions even have a higher h2 than european languages. So the statistics of the text are only similar to glossolalia if you use Eva, which is unlikely to be an accurate transcription of the text's phonemes.

Of course it's true that conditional entropy depends on the transcription (or transliteration) system, but Rene's results (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) do not confirm this statement. He found lower than 2.2 conditional entropy using 4 different transliteration methods (Currier-D'Imperio, First Study Group, EVA, CUVA); the value for European languages typically is >3.

Lindemann and Bowern (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 2021) used 3 different transliterations (one of which is EVA) and found results in the 2.1-2.5 range.

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About Fasano's paper, I agree with Michelle's observations. Also, the absence of an in-depth discussion of Gaskell and Bowern You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (2022) is a serious fault (actually, their paper is not even mentioned!).

Much of the argument is based on statistical figures (such as Zipf's law or conditional entropy) but no actual measures are discussed. Only short samples of glossolalia are presented, accompanied by notes like "the sample size is too small to be conclusive."

I find the subject very interesting and I hope to see more research about it in the future.

(03-06-2024, 07:01 PM)MichelleL11 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The author has not provided any means to contact him in this publication.  This is always a red flag.

If it really is Joseph Fasano from Manhattan University, we can find his email on the university website, however the choice to publish on Semantics Archive and Academia edu remains inexplicable to me.

A solid refutation of glossolalia would be a property of Voynichese that is incompatible with a stream of words that can be generated quickly, at the speed of speech.

I have an idea but I need more time to check.

(03-06-2024, 08:29 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A solid refutation of glossolalia would be a property of Voynichese that is incompatible with a stream of words that can be generated quickly, at the speed of speech.

I have an idea but I need more time to check.

Maybe LAAFU effects? I do not expect an outpouring of glossolalia (which is like a religious experience) to take lines into account at all.