Statement: IF Voynichese does not represent natural language...

[Emma May Smith]

A few points:

• We have to be careful that "natural language" doesn't exclude some kind of artificial language or engineered language. It's perfectly possible (however unlikely) that we're dealing with something which is linguistic but not natural. Assuming any such language is intended to be used and spoken, it shouldn't make a difference to how we generally approach the text. The problem comes when we select a candidate language to fit the text, as no such candidate really exists.
  
• We can say that the text "looks like a language", but the question is to whom? We know it looks similar to a language, but we can also see some differences or mismatches. For somebody in the early 1400s, what would a language look like? I guess they would be more easily fooled and less capable of performing a more indepth study of the text.
  
• This leads us to the question of what a person in the early 1400s would do in order to deceive his contemporaries. The text is complex, it is patterned, it displays relationships between glyphs, between words and the page, which nobody would have been able to fully explore in the creator's lifetime. These could have been added to deceive, but clearly the creator would have put in more effort than was needed, which leads us to question whether we have the correct explanation.
  
• However, the whole idea of "deception" is rather solipsistic. It privileges our negative knowledge as a positive fact: we don't understand the text and therefore the text is "not understandable". To us, yes, but as a fact of the text? Nope.