A key to understand the VMS

[Sam G]

No 'alternative' explanation than 'natural language' for the Voynich MS has ever been demonstrated successfully. but let's not forget at the same time that all attempts to demonstrate 'natural language' as the solution have failed quite miserably.

I don't agree with this.  It's true that attempts to connect the VMS to known languages have all failed miserably, but that really just indicates that it's written in some otherwise unknown language.

Lots of things about the VMS are consistent only with the natural (or perhaps artificial) language hypothesis.  Like the consonant/vowel distinction - what other options are there?  And when we start considering multiple properties together, everything is consistent with a natural language text and not with anything else.

It's hard to imagine what a demonstration that it's a natural language text would look like other than this.  Even if we could understand the illustrations well enough to figure out the meanings of words and ultimately be able to read the entire text, you could still argue that it was a word-for-word cipher of a plaintext in some other language and we still just haven't found the right cipher mechanism yet.

Assuming we agree that the VMS was physically created in the 15th century, then even allowing that its creator might have been well ahead of his time in some way, if the VMS text is something "artificial" then we have to ask why this accomplishment has never been duplicated.  This is despite radical advances in cryptography, linguistics, information theory, etc. since that time, as well as over a century of investigation into the VMS specifically.  Actually, as I've stated elsewhere, this point is almost equally valid even if we allow the possibility that the VMS could have been a hoax made in the early 20th century.

To come back to the topic, the network of similar words in the Voynich MS is clearly real, and there is no doubt that it originates from the 15th century.
It also exists in SE Asian languages, but that does not mean that the Voynich MS text represents such a language.

I don't think the VMS is necessarily written in an East or Southeast Asian language, but I do think it's possible.  The similarities are certainly strong, as has already been pointed out by Jorge Stolfi and Jacques Guy.