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

[Torsten]

Thanks for the response. 

Thanks for this - many things to comment on.

I've added reference to your work. But please understand (like in the language theories section) there are many many many possible papers to discuss and naturally many members of this forum are likely to feel left out that we weren't able to give their work citation or extensive discussion.

If in your opinion your paper covers all relevant arguments for the pseudo-text hypothesis there indeed no need to change anything.

I don't see a contradiction here. "Gibberish" is a cover term for many different text creation processes where there's no underlying syntactic structure.

My point was about the statement that gibberish must be "random". Another term for gibberish is "mumbo-jumbo" since if someone tries to generate something meaningless out of his head he will repeat himself. That manually generated gibberish is repetitive was also a result of the experiment the paper describes on p. 5.

No, it implies that there is discourse and syntactic structure but the method of forming words makes the character-level statistics look non-language-like. Which is in itself a result. Furthermore, these sort of discourse properties are difficult (if not impossible) to fake, whereas it's pretty easy to make character-level changes that affect bigram frequency statistics (nulls, and mergers, for example).

So the observation that the character-level statistics look non-language-like doesn't matter?

9) The paper argues that Currier A and B did use two different methods to encode natural language or did encode two different languages. Unfortunately the observation that common words used in Currier A like <daiin> also occur frequently in Currier B but not vice versa is not addressed  in this context (see Timm & Schinner 2020, p. 7).

We don't actually argue that - in that we don't present much information about it. We assert it based on others' work.

My point was that a lot more about Currier A and B is known today.

If one argues that the text was created with no underlying syntax structure (that is, simply word strings without meaning) then by definition that's random from a linguistic standpoint.

There is no doubt that there is an underlying syntax structure. The question is if there is also some semantic structure.

12) On page 17 the line and the paragraph are discussed as functional units. The paper suggests that the words are ordered or that the "same word will be written differently depending on where it appears in the line" (Bowern & Lindemann 2020, p. 17). There is no discussion if such patterns could be observed in natural languages as well (they doesn't behave this way).

Capitalization is a way in which words are written differently depending on where they appear in a functional unit. There are languages with stressed and unstressed clitics - same functional material with different realizations in different syntactic contexts.

Indeed in different syntactic and semantic contexts words can be written differently. But the paper comes to the conclusion: "All of these observations lead to generalizations which appear to be typographical rather than linguistic in nature." So the "character-level statistics look non-language-like" and the patterns described on line and paragraph level "appear to be typographical rather than linguistic in nature." 

Since the paper comes to the conclusion that "the word and line level metrics show it to be regular natural language" I would be interested in reading an explanation for the described typographical features.

If you read the paper carefully, you'll see we do not assume this at all. We say that gallows are not articles and use this as an example of how one needs to take the consequences of linguistic arguments seriously. And when you do, things like assumptions that gallows are articles in some contexts (superficially an idea, since there are four of them, etc) just don't stand up.

My wording was incorrect. What I meant was that in 'ok-', 'qok-' the gallows are part of the prefixes whereas on page 12 gallows are listed as part of the "Roots/Midfixes". 

I simply don't understand what the paper want to say with the three field structure described on page 11f. Do you want to argue that such a structure exists or not?