Discussion of "A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript"

[Emma May Smith]

I would have a lot more time and respect for the observations about the similarity and co-occurrence of words in the Voynich text were they not continually served up with the same old theory.

That you can't accept a conclusion is not a valid argument against an observation. The additional materials contain in 1.3 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. You can choose a page and check yourself that indeed tokens with high structural similarity appear preferably in close vicinity.

I'm not arguing against the observations here. I think they're interesting and worth discussing. I'm simply remarking that I wish they could be discussed without the accompanying theory. The observations might well be valid for all researchers and stand the test of time. But I'm not going to be the only one who rejects your conclusions.

He stuck to the "same rigid word structure" for the majority of the text. Even though the text likely took weeks, and possibly months or even years, to create. The differences between the word structure from beginning to end are not very great. He knew what the word structure was, inside his head.

The word structure is not as rigid as you suggest. The text is changing from Currier A to Currier B. See also the graph for Words preferred in Currier A and B in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Not words, but word structure. The word [qokeedy] might be common in Currier B and absent in Currier A, but it has the same overall structure as [qokeody], which occurs in both Currier A and B, or [chokody] which appears in both Quire 1 and Quire 20!

There's a deep structure (which I doubt we fully understand) to Voynich words. Your theory does not adequately explain or handle that word structure. We're reduced to believing either:

• There is a formal word structure used to create a meaningless text.
  
• There's an informal word structure inside the writer's head, but it's nothing more than his preferences.
  

Neither of these are intellectually satisfying. They absolve the theory from truly explaining the most interesting parts of the text. Word structure is such a massively important aspect of the text and your theory just shrugs it off as a concern.