[Article] "The Strange Quest to Crack the Voynich Code"

[nickpelling]

Voynich papers that use EVA 'raw' as if all the issues of parsing them into glyphs are non-existent are, of course, the worst culprits of all. In the pantheon of idiocy, these are right up there with channeled solutions and people reading EVA off the page on YouTube.

But using GC's 101 transcription is, in many ways, no less problematic. His take on the problems of transcribing Voynichese may have solved some problems with EVA, but it certainly introduced other problems in their place.

At least with Linear B pretty much all the experts agreed that it was a syllabary. With Voynichese, we still have not even the outline of a proof as to what constitutes a single token.

For example, I think i
 can prove that qo- isn't an extension of o-, which would imply that qo- is an indivisible token. But this doesn't mean that o- is a token. And what of or/ol etc?

It seems like a huge step to me to just assume that one particular parsing schema is the correct one, but it seems like it's no big deal to all these paper writers, so what do I know?