Alisa Gladyseva: Voynich manuscript is decoded

[geoffreycaveney]

I would like to make another possibly relevant observation here: Prior academic history and reputation does not necessarily directly correlate with the credibility or reliability of a researcher's work on a new subject, especially one as fraught with difficulty as the Voynich manuscript. For example, the late linguist Joseph Greenberg was rightly ridiculed for many of his theories about far-flung genetic language relationships that he proposed and even wrote whole books about later in his career--the most outrageous was probably his suggestion that all indigenous languages of North, Central, and South America except for the Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene languages are all genetically related in one gigantic macro-family he called "Amerind". As if the Cree language of north-central Canada, the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego in southernmost Argentina and Chile, and almost everything in between could be related in a single language family. It defies credibility, and indeed it received none. 

But Greenberg actually had a legitimate and rather successful career both as a serious historical linguist researching African languages, and as a pioneer in the field of linguistic typology that has boomed in recent decades and is now quite popular among academic linguists. So Greenberg continues to enjoy a sterling academic reputation in certain fields of linguistics, while his work has been totally discredited in his more speculative and dubious linguistic endeavors. 

I'm not saying Gladyseva is anything like Greenberg. But I'm saying such situations can and do occur in professional academic circles, and we cannot necessarily judge the credibility of an academic researcher's work on one subject by reference to their work and reputation in another field, even a related one.