[Article] Review on "The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript"

[RenegadeHealer]

Funny, I was just rereading Bowern and Lindemann today. I'm not convinced that the VMs's text is (and always has been) meaningless. But I agree with you B&L don't present nearly strong enough evidence to justify how firmly they reject the possibility of it being meaningless. I think I would have been a bit more parsimonious, and put it something like this: "We deem it reasonable to continue to entertain the possibility that the [VMs's text] contains retrievable meaningful content."

This is really all they must establish in order to justify their endeavor. They've given the meaninglessness hypothesis its due respect, if they merely show that it does not render their study completely pointless. But they were more outspokenly dismissive of the meaninglessness hypothesis than was warranted, which makes me suspicious of bias.

Your point about formatting and markup making the Wikipedia text specimens an apples-to-oranges comparison to VMs text specimens is pretty important. Marco took the authors to task on this methodological error in the thread about their paper, and the authors conceded that this is an area for improvement. As you lament in your paper, peer review systems are fallible. In my limited experience with the process of peer review (medical journals, medical student and resident research fairs, and the electrical engineering industry through my wife's family business), peer review is only as good as the least impartial peer reviewing the study. Fortunately, from what I've observed recently, voynich.ninja still provides a coarse and informal but fairly rigorous vetting for anyone who wishes to put their idea to the test.

Like you, I tire of semantic sideshows about the conflation of "random", "hoax", or "gibberish" with "not linguistically meaningful". The first is patently false, and the second two are value judgements, not statements of fact. I'm reminded of lawyers purposely wasting a court's time by splitting hairs over others' wording. Again, what are they avoiding dealing with? I suspect the elephant in the room is that the hypothesis that the VMs's text never contained linguistic meaning is not so easily waved away.

I'd like to have a look at that study L&B cite (apparently their own?), in which producing "more than 100 words" of meaningless language-like text proved exceedingly difficult. Not that I doubt them, but let's see the details of their methodology. If they really wanted to reject your autocopy hypothesis, they should have set it up and run it exactly as you describe, using only tools available to a medieval scribe.

Here's the bottom line, as far as I'm concerned: What statistical tests can reliably distinguish long strings of symbols arranged to communicate a specific linguistic meaning (but whose meaning is not apparent to the experimenter), from long strings of symbols arranged without any such intention? Until someone much more versed in computational linguistics can suggest some tests with demonstrably good sensitivity and specificity for "language-ish gibberish" and/or "undeciphered message", then as far as I'm concerned the whole argument over either real language or fake language being ruled out is mostly posturing.