[Edit by Koen: I split this thread for the discussion of a statement by Gordon Rugg]
I actually agree with some of the statements in the article, even though Rugg and I have different perspectives on the VMS, but this statement:
"Here’s one example. All real languages have regularities in word order. In English, ‘I drink coffee’ is a grammatically accurate sentence but ‘coffee drink I’ isn’t. But the words in the Voynich Manuscript You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in their order. That reason alone is enough to eliminate all known languages from being candidates..."
... is a rather context-dependent statement. If the VMS is a simple substitution cipher, then maybe this kind of generalization can be made, but I'm pretty sure it isn't.
It isn't even necessarily a cipher.
Even if it is a cipher, it doesn't take much manipulation to obscure underlying sentence structure, and thus the grammar (if there is any).
Plus, it's not necessarily true that there are no regularities in the word order. There are line patterns and paragraph patterns. This doesn't necessarily mean Voynichese is natural language, but it does mean there are regularities of certain kinds throughout the text. It's not random.
So I think we have to be careful about statements like this until we have a better understanding of VMS text.
I actually agree with some of the statements in the article, even though Rugg and I have different perspectives on the VMS, but this statement:
"Here’s one example. All real languages have regularities in word order. In English, ‘I drink coffee’ is a grammatically accurate sentence but ‘coffee drink I’ isn’t. But the words in the Voynich Manuscript You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in their order. That reason alone is enough to eliminate all known languages from being candidates..."
... is a rather context-dependent statement. If the VMS is a simple substitution cipher, then maybe this kind of generalization can be made, but I'm pretty sure it isn't.
It isn't even necessarily a cipher.
Even if it is a cipher, it doesn't take much manipulation to obscure underlying sentence structure, and thus the grammar (if there is any).
Plus, it's not necessarily true that there are no regularities in the word order. There are line patterns and paragraph patterns. This doesn't necessarily mean Voynichese is natural language, but it does mean there are regularities of certain kinds throughout the text. It's not random.
So I think we have to be careful about statements like this until we have a better understanding of VMS text.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)