Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript

[RenegadeHealer]

For example, in English, you could say, "Keep you tomorrow health best," and everyone would understand it, but no one says it that way. They would normally say, "Take care," or "Be well," "Gesundheit," or "Watch out for your health," or a few other common phrases. No one would say, "Keep you tomorrow health best."

Indeed, I have found usage the hardest part of a foreign language to master, and often neglected by foreign language learning programs. I’m a bit of a human parrot; mastering a foreign phonology is not that hard for me.  Even if your mastery of a language’s phonology, vocabulary, and grammar are all hard to distinguish from a native speaker’s, if you don’t phrase things like a native speaker would, your speech will still sound quite odd to a native speaker. There is no “learn a language in 5min a day with our app!” (to say nothing of Google Translate) solution to this. The only way to fix this is to have lots of conversations with native speakers, and to pay attention to and copy their usage of words and phrases for specific situations.

I’d imagine for ancient languages that are no longer spoken [the way they used to be], there’s an analogous process: after reading lots and lots of writing in that language by fluent speakers, the reader will eventually come to know what to expect in terms of usage, and be able to easily identify deviations from this typical usage which would signal a less-than-fluent or inexperienced user of the language.