[Article] Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript

[Emma May Smith]

That's a bit strange: I left a fairly extensive comment on AgnosticVoynich pointing out that the article (well, I had read the preprint) missed all mention of Prescott Currier's paper which talks about the specific phenomena the article covers, along with the explanations he proposed (which the article also did not mention). And yet this comment seems not to have appeared there.

Emma, did you moderate it out? Or do you not publish comments?

Hello Nick

I hadn't moderated that comment away, I promise. I found the comment in the spam folder and have published it to the relevant post. It's a valid point to raise.

The Currier Paper is mentioned in the final article, but only as a footnote recognising that he was the first to observe the phenomenon and for a couple of other points. We don't build upon his research further for a few reasons. I don't consider his conclusions to be useful: he gives no solid reasons for his conclusions against linguistic arguments and doesn't expand on his suggestions enough to let others explore them.

Even so, the explanations Marco and I explored in the paper aren't strictly dependent on what the words are, simply how the combinations might be caused. We try to treat words as strings of glyphs between spaces, so that explanations could apply regardless. I expect that the explanation for "digits" or "numbers" would have fallen under point 4. The arrangement of whole words creates certain word break combinations.

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Congrats Marco and Emma with the paper and cooperation. 

But as I understand, since I do not have free access, I must pay to see this paper (as well) ?

Hello

A preprint is freely available here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.