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

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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. 

Hi Torsten: I agree with everything in your post, and have often... even on this thread... pointed out several of your points. Of course you are familiar with Hélène Smith, but:

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"Flournoy concluded that her "Martian" language had a strong resemblance to Ms. Smith's native language of French and that her automatic writing was "romances of the subliminal imagination, derived largely from forgotten sources (for example, books read as a child)." He invented the term cryptomnesia to describe this phenomenon."

I have and have read Flournoy's book, and this is a recurring observation of his. This would be "automatic writing": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I think it is reasonable to consider it would. And if so, then there is really little way to know, from any of these studies, whether the Voynich has real meaning or not. What do you think?

I had come across many instances of the same thing... I think in fact in every case I found, there was underlying structure of language. What I would love to see is one of these randomly generated written strings being tested by the same methods as Voynichese, to see if they show similar comparisons to the meaningful language samples that are always used.

This test might settle this issue one way or the other.