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

[nickpelling]

Currier was one of the pioneers, but his work is 40 years old now. We have much more complete data, much better data and infinitely better tools than he did.

Even if he was the first to publicly show some effects in the MS to the world, some of his conclusions are very questionable.

If Currier's conclusions on the specific phenomenon the paper focused on were relevant (and I think they most certainly are), they should have been acknowledged and reviewed: if they proved to be lacking or wrong, the paper would be the correct and best place to make that clear.

As you know, the point of an academic paper is to review, build upon (and indeed sometimes supplant) previous literature on the subject: the reader should always have the reassurance that the peer reviewers were sufficiently well-versed in the subject matter that they were able to hold the writers to account against the previous literature. That's how it works, that's the deal: and we've seen this last month (with Cheshire) the stupendous pushback that can happen when this process fails to do this.

In the preprint here, footnote #1 says "The authors would like to thank René Zandbergen for his comments and advice on this paper", so in this instance you are defending something that you yourself directly contributed to. You may not like my comments, but I'm struggling to see why you think the basic standards that any other paper writer would expect to be held to don't apply here.