A key to understand the VMS

[Sam G]

All this really shows is that Voynichese is not like English or Arabic.  By contrast, look at a table of allowed syllables in Mandarin Chinese, for instance:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The possible syllables of Mandarin certainly do form a "network".  It is not exactly the same as Voynichese in every respect, of course, but this is getting us a lot closer.

Sam,

Please forgive my straightforward speech, but I think this is a fallible tactic often used by proponents of the "natural language" hypothesis. There are 7000 natural languages to draw from. If one feature of the VMS is problematic (syllabic structure), one language is mentioned (Chinese). If another feature of VMS is problematic (relations between similar-looking words), a different language is cited (Japanese). If a third feature is odd, a third language is cited, and so on. I can't remember if you also mentioned Arabic in the past, or if that was only Emma.

Either way you get my point: Voynichese can't be all these languages simultaneously with all these strange features. There is no language with the syllabic structure of Chinese, the "atomic roots" of a polysynthetic language, a head-right suffix system like the Japanese ko-so-a-do words words, etc. etc. etc. We would need a rare, mythical, platypus-like language and that seems unlikely

Where have you or Torsten or anyone else ever put forward an argument of this form, i.e., that while the individual properties may be found in known languages, collectively they cannot be found?  Give me one example of this, please.  Certainly the arguments under consideration in this thread were not of this kind.

The point still stands that individually all of these properties can be found in known languages.  Therefore these simplistic arguments of the form "it can't be a natural language because it has property X" are wrong.  That's all I'm doing here: refuting statements that are clearly incorrect.  I don't see how it can be considered a "fallible tactic" that I am responding to arguments that have been made rather than some other argument that has not been made.

Note that I have stressed that these comparisons are not necessarily exact in every or any way.  Obviously we don't know Voynichese works so many of the properties of the text could have multiple possible explanations based on what we know now.  The point is only that there is no convincing argument against the idea that the VMS text is simply written in some unusual natural language.

Now, if you want to make some case that the combination of properties in the VMS cannot occur in a single language, feel free to lay that argument out in detail somewhere.  Maybe try backing your argument up with some actual evidence, such as citing some literature on linguistic universals, rather than just making a baseless assertion and leaving it up to others to find the problems with it.  That would be a welcome change.

Incidentally, I think you are engaging in a bit of projection in that the "fallible tactic" you accuse me of is one most frequently employed by cipher theorists - using different cipher methods to account for different properties of the text and then asserting that we're looking at a "mixed cipher system" or some such, when of course such a thing can never be demonstrated to actually exist.