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

[geoffreycaveney]

So this is surely one of the reasons why Voynichese feels like a language.

There is considerable quantitative evidence (shifts and jumps in glyph n-gram statistics, autocopy, LAAFU, PAAFU, entropy increase on the third glyph, etc.) that the text is not what it appears (superficially) to be: written in an unknown but not-too-weird natural language. Also, beside vowel-like glyphs that happen to work well as vowels, it looks like the author(s) put far too much in their creation of what makes a text language-like (repeated words, common glyph patterns and common Gothic abbreviations) to make it as obvious as possible that it is language, nothing but language.

If the VMS is inherently deceptive about the nature of the text, either because it is strongly coded or encrypted (an anachronism in the 15th century), or because it represents something else than language, then everything else prima facie about the VMS (an otherwise unremarkable herbal/astrological/medicinal manuscript) is probably nothing but deception and misdirection too. It would be inconsistent to go through the effort of creating a unbreakable system for the text and then label objects and give precious hints about the subject in illustrations, giving researchers a "low hanging fruit" to attack.

To me the most obvious example of a "low hanging fruit" is the illustration of the group of seven stars. The MS author made no attempt to disguise the intended signification of this illustration: it is obvious to everyone on Earth for all of history that it must represent the Pleiades. We recognize it; Aristotle would recognize it; the author clearly must have known everyone would recognize it. And the author put a word label right next to this illustration.

On the other hand, the Zodiac symbol illustrations on their separate pages do not have obvious word labels right next to each of them. The only obvious labels for them are the ones written in later in Latin letters, apparently in a dialect of French.

If the author wanted to avoid giving any clues, he or she would not have put a word label right next to the illustration of the group of seven stars. On the other hand, if the author wanted to give deliberately false clues with deceptive illustrations, I would think he or she would have done so with the Zodiac symbol illustrations in the same way that he or she did with the Pleiades illustration.

The lack of consistency in the handling of the labeling of the Pleiades vs. that of the Zodiac symbols suggests to me that there was not some systematic deliberate plan intended on the part of the author throughout the MS text, either to avoid providing clues or to deliberately provide false clues as a form of deception.

Geoffrey