devil's advocate: the case for glossolalia

[Emma May Smith]

The point about Ventris trying Greek out on Linear B is fair. I only wish we knew as much about the Voynich text as he did about Linear B. He and other researchers (principally Kober) had gleaned so much information about words and the script that it was obvious whether an attempted solution was good or bad.

We're lacking so much of that knowledge with the Voynich text. Especially as the word structure suggests that even a "good" solution might look pretty weird. (I suppose Mycenaean Greek looked pretty weird too at first.) It wouldn't surprise me if we found a solution which could read part of the text convincingly (labels, for example) but still left other parts of the text highly obscure.

For me, at least right now, a "bad" solution is not strictly one with a bad output but with a poorly reasoned method. Well reasoned gibberish is more appealing than obscurantist Shakespeare. We will learn something from the former; the latter only proves a distraction.