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

[Torsten]

I believe the last sentence of the pre-print is a good summary: 

We would like to suggest that the existence of word break combinations provides some support for the possibility that the Voynich text is written phonetically in a language. We also believe that information gleaned from further study of word break combinations could help to identify the sound values of the glyphs in which the text is written.

In other words, a few aspects of the word-break combinations phenomenon find parallel in written languages, suggesting that Voynichese is phonetic. While "phonetic" is strongly correlated with "linguistic", it needn't necessarily be.

Do you realy want to argue "that the Voynich text is written a phonetically written language" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 19), but that you don't "refute the idea that the manuscript is non-linguistic" and that "Voynichese is phonetic" but not necessarily linguistic? Does that mean that the VMS-text is using a phonetically written non-linguistic language?

Anyway, it is well known that some properties behave like natural language. See Reddy & Knight: "Some features – the lack of repeated bigrams and the distributions of letters at line-edges – are linguistically aberrant, which others – the word length and frequency distributions, the apparent presence of morphology, and most notably, the presence of page-level topics – conform to natural language-like text" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

So you can search for aspects parallel to natural language or you can try to understand why some properties behave differently. The choice is yours.