TED-ED Video

[Torsten]

This is what Cryptologists say about the Voynich manuscript:

"Languages simply do not behave in this way." [...]

Sorry Torsten, but that is not right.

One cannot take the words of Friedman, Tiltman, et al. and interpret them as saying something that they did not mean.
 
The essence of what each of them was saying is that a reasonably simple cipher is not going to work in decrypting the Voynich MS, for the various reasons that they presented: it will not result in a text with language-like behaviour.

Friedman settled on the possibility that it was some constructed language, so his opinion is definitely language.

Tiltman declared that he considered some more complicated form of a cipher, not that it's meaningless.

Their conclusions further justify the words in the video.

The better known argument in favour of meaningful contents is the Montemurro and Zanette paper, as I already mentioned before, which made the press some years ago.

Note that I don't agree with their conclusions.  That is: I don't think that the conclusion is justified by the analysis.

Rene you cannot take one sentence of my post and argue against something I didn't say! The word meaningless or the name Friedman is not even part of my post!

The question was, has the text all the characteristics of a real language. Tiltman and D'Imperio give clear examples why they mean that the words in the text didn't behave like words in a natural language. See for instance sentences like "I am not aware of any long repetitions of more than 2 or 3 words in succession, as might be expected" or "lack for parallel context surrounding different occurrences of the same word". They clearly mean that the words doesn't behave as expected in natural language. It is also correct that they assume a system different from natural language for the Voynich manuscript. It is obvious that it is necessary to explain all the regularities found in the text of the VMS. Therefore it is no surprise that they search for an explanation for the regularities found. But they are still searching for an answer. 

In the end I sum it up and give some reasons why the words in the manuscript "doesn't behave like words in a natural language" and say "If you assume that the text contains meaning the question is what a group of symbols can stand for?" 

The question is what is the system behind the text of the VMS. Why it is possible to describe all the regularities for the manuscript? Why is the combination-space for the glyph groups restricted? Why did the glyph groups co-occur with similar groups in a given context?

The findings described by Montemurro and Zanette paper didn't allow their conclusions. This was for instance criticized by Stephen Chrisomalis‏: "So in essence, Montemurro and Zanette seem to be suggesting that the VM has properties similar to no writing system ever known to have been used on earth, because they do not seem to know what sorts of writing systems they are comparing things to." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). 

Montemurro and Zanette did analyze the text as a whole. They use words that "are both highly frequent and have a strongly non-uniform distribution over the different 'thematic' sections". Only for this words they came to the conclusion that "Words that are related by their semantic contents tend to co-occur along the text" (Montemurro). Currier has described the same pattern as evidence for a language A and B. "The characteristics of 'languages' A and B are obviously statistical. Suffice it to say, the differences are obvious and statistically significant. There are two different series of agglomerations of symbols or letters, so that there are in fact two statistically distinguishable 'languages.'" This means that the very same pattern is used by Currier to show that there must be at least two 'language' systems and by Montemurro and Zanette that there is a language system! But if there are at least two distinguishable 'languages' the words are maybe related to there 'language' and not to their semantic contents. Since the text of the manuscript is not homogeneous it is necessary to take this into account while comparing the text with something else. Montemurro and Zanette are failing to do so. 
Moreover Montemurro and Zanette use the same pattern to demonstrate "links between the thematic sections of the text according to their common words". This way they link all sections of the manuscript together. Unfortunately they are not aware of the work of  Currier. Therefore they didn't notice that the whole characteristic of the text is changing and that  they link this way two distinguishable 'languages' together. Therefore they didn't investigate why the text is changing his characteristics in this way. Normally languages didn't change over time. Therefore Montemurro and Zanette have found in fact evidence that the manuscript is not compatible with natural language.