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

[Emma May Smith]

Did you know that Prescott Currier got "an A.B. in Romance Languages at George Washington University, and a Diploma in Comparative Philology at the University of London"? He was also a wartime codebreaker, so there was a lifetime of both linguistic and codebreaking skills behind his opinions.

As such, I would expect he fulfils all the criteria you could possibly have for someone able to put forward a valid opinion on this kind of phenomenon. So I find your paper's failure to cite both his work on the subject and his proposed explanations quite incomprehensible, sorry. :-(

I don't think "digits" falls even remotely under point 4, again sorry.

Hi Nick, Prescott Currier's qualifications and background are not the issue in contention, his statements are. I stand by what I said, "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." Currier's total statement on possible causes of this phenomenon is no more that 58 words long.

Any response to Currier's conclusions would either be:

1. The reasons why Currier came to his conclusions are not stated, and therefore it is not possible to evaluate them.
   
2. We assume the reasons he came to his conclusions and argue against our assumptions, even though the assumptions could be wrong.
   

Neither of these would have been useful.

I would be happy, were you to expand on Currier's conclusions, to respond specifically to your interpretations. I have no fear of discussing any valid point, but it is impossible to discuss something which simply isn't there. I assume, by you dismissal of point 4 as an explanation, you have a clear idea of what Currier was thinking.