TED-ED Video

[Torsten]

Here is the statement:

"Cryptologists say the writing has all the characteristics of a real language."


Is that really true? Is that the general consensus among cryptologists? Is there a general consensus among cryptologists?

I'm very keen on the possibility that the Voynich text is ultimately a natural language or something very similar, and I wouldn't quite agree with this statement (not that I'm a cryptologist either).

This is what Cryptologists say about the Voynich manuscript:

"Languages simply do not behave in this way." ... "And yet I am not aware of any long repetitions of more than 2 or 3 words
in succession, as might be expected for instance in the text under the botanical drawings". (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. p.9)

"The short words, the many sequential repetitions, the rarity of one- or two letter words, the rarity of doublets (doubled letters), all militate
against simple substitution. So also does the strange lack for parallel context surrounding different occurrences of the same word as shown by words indexes. In the words of several researchers 'the text just doesn't act like natural language'." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. p. 30)

The whole manuscript only consists of groups of glyphs which are similar to each other.  The combination-space for the glyph groups is restricted and the groups are self-similar in a given context like a page. This observation stands behind one of the ideas described by D'Imperio: After this idea the text contains words in a simple substitution cipher concealed in a longer dummy message. "The scribe, faced with the task of thinking up a large number of such dummy sequences, would  naturally tend to repeat parts of neighboring strings with various small changes and additions to fill out  the line until the next message-bearing word or phrase." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. p. 31)

"That’s just the point — they’re not words!" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

The manuscript contains only similar glyph groups whereas the ways to combine the glyphs to groups are restricted in some way. Yes, the groups are separated by spaces. In this way they look like words in a normal text. But they doesn't behave like words in a natural language: 
1) For instance it is not possible to distinguish different word types which can stand for nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. 
2) It is not possible to identify some sort of grammar determining which words can follow each other. 
3) Longer sequences of repeated text are missing for the manuscript. 
4) The word length distribution is unusual for a natural language. 
...

The main question for the text of the Voynich manuscript is the way the glyph groups work. If you assume that the text contains meaning the question is what a group of symbols can stand for.