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

[Torsten]

In this thread mainly statements about other subjects were discussed. However a paper should be judged because of the facts and the line of argumentation provided.

The central point in the paper of Bowern and Lindemann is their conclusion: "The higher structure of the manuscript itself is completely consistent with natural language and is very unlikely to be manufactured." In detail the authors argue that "For measures that look above the word to line and paragraph, as well as in the distribution of words across the manuscript, it looks like a natural language." 
However, it is well known that the Voynich manuscript provides language like features as well as non-language like features. Language like feature are for instance that the distribution of words follows both of Zipf's Laws and that the TF-IDF values demonstrate that words depend on the page (see Reddy & Knight 2011). It seems as if pages "do have topics, but are not independent of one another" (Reddy & Knight 2011). 
A non-language like feature is for instance the observation that the text only contains a few repeated word bigrams and trigrams (this means repeated phrases are missing). Several researchers did point to this fact as evidence against the natural language hypotheses (see Tiltmann 1976, D'Imperio 1978, Reddy & Knight 2011, Ito 2002 and Timm 2015). Other counter-arguments are the shift from Currier A to Currier B,  the fact that some herbal pages are written in Currier A whereas others are written in Currier B and also the fact that words did co-occur together with similar ones. For instance words ending in '-edy' are typical for Currier B but almost non-existent in Currier A and words starting with 'cho-' are frequently used in Currier A and often occur repeated, but occur less frequently in Currier B (see Currier 1976). 
To draw a conclusion it is therefore necessary to weight in the top language like features as well as the top non-language like features.

Bowern and Lindemann are also arguing that the text is unlikely to be manufactured since "gibberish is by nature random". It seems as if Bowern and Lindemann would expect that they could easily identify gibberish since someone generating some pseudo text would avoid language like structures. Such an argumentation is not comprehensible. 
Not only is no one seriously claiming that the text is pure noise, is is even impossible to generate longer random sequences manually: "It is a dramatic observation that when human subjects asked to generate random sequences, they normally cannot produce sequences that satisfy accepted criteria for randomness" (Treismann and Faulkner 1987, p. 338 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). (see also Tune 1964, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and Wagennar 1972, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). There are even experiments demonstrating that humans usually fail to discriminate between random and nonrandom sequences, the bias being in direction of negative recency (see Wagennar 1970, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).