A case for Gibberish

[Mark Knowles]

 doesn't matter, it could be a reference label, an abbreviation, or an adjective rather than a noun

• Where can one find the thing to which it refers? It might be a location on a page. In the middle ages, they did use location markers (section a, b, c, or d referring to a quadrant of the same page or of another page). They also used several different (and cryptic-looking) systems to refer to Biblical passages. Everyone knew what they meant. In Greek manuscripts numeric labels were quite common.
  
• Brief abbreviations are only useless if you are not familiar with them. I see brief abbreviations in thousands of manuscripts. They are very common. Maps often have them also. Words are very frequently truncated or chopped into pieces.
  
• It's very easy for different adjectives to apply to different drawings. Words like hot and cold, wet and dry were applied to everything in the middle ages. Verbs, also. Words like grind, powder, mix, and soak.
  

Of course dissimilar items can in priniciple have the same label. However in think in practice this falls down when one looks at labels in the Voynich.

(1) There are a variety of possibilities for references. They could be on the same page, they could be in some index, they could be on some unknown and separate text. If one of these is the case we have to ask how this could work in practice. Some pages do not contain accompanying passages of text within which to refer to, so what could the position refer to? If there is some kind of index page then it should have a completely different structure to other pages. If there is a separate document referred to, then where is that document and why don't we have any evidence of it and it would have to be quite long and large to accommodate all the references.

(2) Brief abbreviations become a problem in this instance given the very different nature and specificity of the drawings with the same abbreviation. Take for example if a plant has the label which means "Ar" and this is shared with a star, a pipe and a naked lady then how should one work out what the label is an abbreviation of. An abbreviation is of no use unless one can work out what it is an abbreviation of. Brief abbreviations include lots of ambiguity.

(3) Again one has to consider what different adjectives could be in practice given the very different drawings. I don't see how words like hot and cold, wet and dry could apply to multiple of the kind of drawings that we see in the Voynich in a meaningful way and verbs like grind, powder, mix, and soak even less so. Words like good and bad are so simple that they seem relatively useless in these contexts.

But for me the real clincher is that the repeated labels tend to have very similar spellings to other repeated labels. So for example if "otol" is a repeated label and "okol" is also a repeated label and so on. This does not fit well with either scenarios (2) or (3). And it creates a lot of limitations when it comes to (1)

I don't think these problems can be brushed under the carpet.