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

[MarcoP]

It seems that you believe that if you want to demonstrate that the VMS represents language it is only necessary to point to a feature shared by the VMS-text and a language. But not every thing with some wheels is a cart and not every being with two legs is a duck. With other words you can't cherry pick the features you want to compare. It is therefore problematic that your paper does not address known counter arguments to the natural language hypothesis.

Hi Torsten,
thank you for your reply!
I believe that to demonstrate that the VMS represents language one must provide a reliable translation. We are anywhere close to anything like that. Exploring features one by one makes things more manageable in my eyes, but of course until all features are explained together, it is not possible to speak of a "solution" (linguistic or otherwise).
We are not in a position to refute the idea that the manuscript is non-linguistic and we don't claim to be. We mention the idea that the manuscript could be meaningless. We discuss how some aspects word-break combinations have parallels in linguistic phenomena.

Moreover you come yourself to the conclusion that "the second glyph in a combination depends on the first". You don't address the objection of Currier that it is typical for natural languages that the suffix of a word depends on the beginning of the next word. This means that you present in fact a counter argument against the natural language hypothesis without discussing this point.

I don't think it is correct to say that we came to a "conclusion" about the direction of the influence between the two sides of a combination. We wrote:

We can thus only tentatively say that the second glyph in a combination depends on the first.

Even if this hypothesis seems to us the best explanation for the observations, an influence in the other direction is also possible. It could also be that different causes concur to the phenomenon. It would be great to be in the position to make a stronger statement, but we are not. So, no "conclusion" yet.

Edit: I see it's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. you turn this very sentence into something different from what we said. The reason why you keep doing so escapes me.

I also want to point out that what Currier said is: "I can think of no linguistic explanation for this sort of phenomenon, not if we are dealing with words or phrases, or the syntax of a language where suffixes are present. In no language I know of does the suffix of a word have anything to do with the beginning of the next word." 
I cannot make sense of this sentence. Emma already mentioned that the English article a/an is an obvious counterexample. Italian is a counterexample as a language making use of suffixes which are altered on the  basis of the beginning of the next word.

Your statement that "the suffix of a word depends on the beginning of the next word" is true for Italian and the English article a/an, but it is not true for all languages. For instance, in our paper, we mention initial consonant mutation in Welsh:

An example is the definite article y which causes the soft mutation: merch (‘daughter’) becomes y ferch, and draig (‘dragon’) becomes y ddraig.

Another point is that the paper describes relevant differences between Currier A and B and argues that "word-break combinations are more predictable than for Latin and English, and also more predictable in Currier B than for Italian" (E. Smith and M. Ponzi 2019, p. 14). In my eyes it is relevant that this observation is not consistent for the whole text. You also argue that such differences are relevant in your eyes: "There would need to be a separate cause for the increase in the number of words beginning with [o] and an additional process to bring them into the combination [n.o]" (Smith & Ponzi, p. 18). But you only use this difference to argue against the idea that the "arrangement of whole words creates certain word-break combinations" (Smith & Ponzi, p. 18). But how do you explain this observation for the natural language hypothesis?

As I said above, my idea is that the author or authors modified (possibly "improved", at least in their eyes) their writing system during the  creation of the manuscript. I know this is not much of an explanation, but given the "continuous" drift from A to B I find it hard to think of something very different from what yourself propose.

In the case of the '[n.o]' combination, this could mean (for example) that in Currier B the author was more accurate in representing an euphonich prefix that was not represented in Currier A. As I said above, how phonetic alterations are represented in the written form is highly variable. For instance the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is audible but has no impact on the written language: the author could have gradually introduced the written representation of some vaguely similar word-boundary phenomenon.

You say that you prefer to believe that the VMS contains meaningful words. It will not surprise you that such a statement does not convince me.

Ah ah ah, no, it doesn't surprise me.
I know you are as happy with your certainties as I am with my doubts