[Article] What Will It Take to Solve the Voynich Manuscript?

[Torsten]

Thanks for these thoughts, all. My main point wasn't about the linguistics at all - that was simply introductory. The point of the paper is that a workable solution must make sense, whether it results in legible text or not. It must be in accordance with the evidence, it must be repeatable. That all seems inarguable to me. Remember as well that this journal has a broad, populist audience. It is not a journal for specialists. It isn't meant to present new work or to tell you, the Voynich Ninja contributors, anything you don't already know. It is meant to be an introductory piece for an audience who only knows about the VMS from public media and wants to know a little more.

Thank you for your response. Especially since you reach a broader audience it becomes important if you state something as a fact. For instance now it is possible to read something like this online: "Experts confirm that the writing appears to be an actual language, just not one anyone has ever seen before" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). 

Sorry, but you can't argue that the point of the article is "whether it results in legible text or not" if you wrote in fact "until the text is rendered legible, we will not for sure." (Davis 2020, p. 75). What you write in your article is exactly the opposite of what you say now.

I'm not going to debate this particular article further, as it wasn't intended to make an argument about the contents of the VMS at all, just to introduce readers to the manuscript and some of the complexities involved in working with it.

The complexity involved in deciphering the Voynich manuscript is justified by unexpected and seemingly contradictory results like the two "languages" Currier A and Currier B or the extraordinary low entropy values. The Voynich manuscript is not difficult since researchers didn't cooperate. It is difficult since its writing system behaves differently from any writing system known so far. But this fact isn't even mentioned in your article. Instead you suggest that "repeating grammatical patterns" and "linguistically identifiable roots, prefixes, and suffixes" must be obvious (Davis 2020, p. 73). But in fact researchers are puzzled because of the absence of such patterns.

For instance D'Imperio wrote "The short words, the many sequential repetitions, the rarity of one- or two letter words, the rarity of doublets (doubled letters), all militate against simple substitution. So also does the strange lack for parallel context surrounding different occurrences of the same word as shown by words indexes. In the words of several researchers 'the text just doesn't act like natural language" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 30) or Tiltmann "My analysis, I believe shows that the text cannot be the result of substituting single symbols for letters in the natural oder. Languages simply do not behave in this way. ...  And yet I am not aware of any long repetitions of more than 2 or 3 words in succession, as might be expected for instance in the text under the botanical drawings" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 9).

You write that it is important to cooperate and to be aware of the results of other researchers. But your article is failing to do so.