The incompatibility of Voynichese with natural human language

[RenegadeHealer]

@davidjackson, Koen G, farmerjohn, and -JKP-, that's very helpful, and clears up a lot of the confusion I (and probably many others) have had with the incompatibility premise. I see a common theme in all four of your responses, and so a more precise way to state the conclusion could go something like this:

• The patterns of glyph arrangement in the VMS are not consistent with any known samples of unprocessed natural human language.
  

David and Koen, I agree with you that the statement "The VMS's text contains no meaning" needs to be teased apart from the statement "The VMS's text contains no unprocessed natural human language." It's very easy for a layperson to conflate these two statements, especially when there are researchers who believe the former (and whose work is motivated to varying degrees by this belief), but have found support for the latter statement in their work. The only way to falsify "The VMS's text contains no meaning" is a reliable and replicable extraction of meaning from the text. As long as such an extraction remains elusive or contestable, the possibility of meaninglessness is always on the table. Incompatibility with unprocessed natural language, however, is a much more parsimonious claim which is much easier to falsify, as I described. And so the fact that it has resisted all attempts at falsification makes it a fairly robust statement.


The questions that follow from this, in my mind:

1. if Voynichese is the output of a transformation (or a series of transformations) applied to natural human language, as farmerjohn phrases it, what could this transformation consist of?
   
2. What are the clues that it was a specific sort of transformation, as opposed to another?
   
3. If the likely transformation algorithm can be ascertained, is it one that lends itself to reverse engineering, given the text of the extant VMS folios as the only raw data? (I.e. no key or other documents written in this script ever found)
   

I did some reading recently on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which is an interesting read for anyone working with undeciphered writing. The argument basically states that language understandable to only one person cannot be deemed meaningful. It seems to me that if the VMS performed the function of real human symbolic communication, but was purposely designed to hide this meaning very well from all but a select few (or only one person), then barring the discovery of additional written materials connected to the VMS, one could argue that it has become meaningless, even if it wasn't meaningless at the time it was created.

By way of analogy, let's say I posted a message on the Internet, using a complex encryption tool like a PGP key, and published it using identity-obfuscating technologies like a VPN and the Tor browser. It seems to me that if I never made the PGP key available to anyone (including the intended recipients of the message), and successfully obfuscated myself as the source of the message, then my encrypted message would be meaningless. The mathematical operations involved in decrypting and tracing the source of the message would be so impractical as to be essentially impossible. Therefore, there would be no hope for anyone attempting to extract meaning from it, and it would be indistinguishable from a stochastically generated string of nonsense for all who tried.