[Article] Unconventional Methods in Voynich Manuscript Analysis

[Torsten]

Well, one can try to make many different piints of course. I am always careful in using the word 'facts', and find that in many cases it is used incorrectly.

The problem is not the usage of the word 'facts'. The problem is that the proponents of the natural language hypotheses do not consider former efforts to analyze the text.

There is for instance a broad consensus about the observations as described by Currier in 1976. No one ever argued that some of his observations are erroneous. On the contrary, observations like the described differences between Currier A and Currier B were confirmed multiple times. See for instance your own webpage (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), the paper of Reddy & Knight (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), the blog of Julian Bunn (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), the blog of Nick Pelling (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), or my paper from 2015 (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Moreover, on you website you even describe "differences between the two stars dialect" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

But if it comes to the natural language hypothesis no one considers the well known differences between Currier A and B. Montemurro et al. 2013, Amancio et al. 2013, Arruda et al. 2018, and Zelinka et al. 2019 are not aware of Curriers work or about his observations. Smith et al. 2019 are aware about differences between Currier A and B. They even describe some differences on their own (see Smith et al., p. 15). But when it comes to the language hypotheses they do not discuss them (see Smith et al., p. 18f).

There is no doubt that it is necessary to consider all the observations known about the VMS-text. You argue yourself that the differences between Currier A and B "does not demonstrate that the text is meaningful, or that the text variations are caused by different subject matter (as suggested in by Montemurro and Zanette). If that were the case, the difference between herbal A and herbal B should not exist. The cause of the (statistical) language variation is still unexplained" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).