Quote:Removed from context, it's easy to see this as a blanket statement that the VMS could not be a "plaintext" in any language. But from context it's pretty clear that he was mainly trying to make a point that it could not a be a simple substitution cipher presumably of a European language. The idea that the VMS could be written in some kind of very unusual (from the European point of view) natural language is not a possibility that he addressed one way or the other in this paper.
Tiltman does not say about any particular language. He says about "languages" in general. But, as Rene already pointed above, Tiltman was not an expert in linguistics, so actually his opinion here may be not that authoritative, so, hypothetically, there might be languages that behave "this way".
Quote:I think we all agree on the text being "something special". Whatever it is, or not. How can we solve it, together. How do we get a rocket to the moon?
My idea is that the approach should be "theory-independent" as far as possible. There is no need to decide between cipher, natural language, synthetic language earlier than it's really required. Many things can be done before that. Especially:
- investigating what's the real Voynichese alphabet
- exploring contextual affinities
- tracing internal narration structure