Quote:And not only learned people have tried. Various nuts and cranks have made their attempts as well, and some even got their papers published in respected journals. These people have made some outrageous claims as well, not hindered by any form of knowledge.
I think we can agree with this.
Quote:If you ask me, I believe that it is a very clever practical joke, a hoax, probably from the 15thcentury, the same date as the vellum and the ink. If it would have been a real language, in a rational and regular writing system, experts would have figured it out by now.
It is possible that the text is meaningless. But that does not automatically mean it was a hoax. Maybe the VMS is a draft copy of a manuscript that was eventually intended to be made into a more professional version and perhaps the actual text would be added when the final version was created. Or maybe the text is referential (refers to another manuscript that has not been found or which has been destroyed). Maybe it is a symbolic language. Maybe it is steganographic and the actual content is only a percentage of what we see.
Even if it is meaningless, I think there is still value in being able to describe how the text was laid down because it is clearly not random, it is quite systematic, and unraveling that system might open up text analysis techniques that do not yet exist.
If the text were a one-to-one substitution cipher (as most people assume), it would have been deciphered by now. If it were a natural language with only a few characters changed (e.g., "gallows") it would have been read by now (regardless of the language). It is something else and there is something to be learned by trying to determine its nature.