[Article] The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript (Bowern et al. 2020)

[cbowern]

Thanks for this! I'll try to answer the main questions (quick note that I'm relatively new to Voynich.ninja and haven't extensively browsed prior discussions).

Now that I've a had a chance to read the paper, I'd say that it is clear and generally well-written but it is best viewed as setting forth the status quaestionis of the VM rather than advancing a key new insight.

Yes - that was its purpose. Luke and I were asked to write an overview of the current state of work on Voynich linguistics, which included a historical overview, some citation and discussion of others' work, and some of our own recent work. We had a strict word limit and so unfortunately were unable to cite everything we would have liked to.

The paper does not consider Schinner and Timm's work, which in my view is a major oversight since their auto-citation proposal, if I understand it correctly, can generate some of the supposed linguistic features discussed in the paper (like the Zipfian behaviors).

I'm less convinced that Zipfian distributions are crucial evidence one way or the other. Many things follow power law distributions.

They are also probably too quick to a late medieval/early modern fake here:
[quote="Bowern et al. 2020:5"]We also consider it unlikely that the The Voynich Manuscript is an ancient hoax. The cost associated with the production of such a manuscript and the number of people involved make it unlikely that it was created purely to deceive. A much smaller hoax would have served the same purpose with much less expense. Moreover, people who assume that the manuscript is a medieval gibberish hoax massively underestimate the amount of effort required to produce sustained language-like nonsense.5

We wrote that before the information about Scottish wikipedia came up (not exactly a hoax but not real) (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). I'm not fully convinced though, when something of less scale would be as effective and cheaper.

I'd like to know more about this undergraduate experiment--as well as others in asemic writing--especially on the nature of local repetitions (how are they comparable to the VM's repetitiousness?). Again, here, some engagement with the Schinner & Timm proposal may be enlightening. Can undergraduates, briefly trained in auto-citation, simulate features of the text?

Next time I teach the class (next year most likely) we'll try it out.