Voynich Reconsidered

[Anton]

Apologies if this shows up with excessive unnecessary white space between paragraphs -- not sure why that's happening...

This is a known glitch, however we don't know how to fix it. BTW, you can use text selection to quote portions of text. Just select the phrase that you wish to quote with your mouse, and then hit the "Reply" pop-up that appears next. This will paste the selection into the editor window.

What I am suggesting is that hypothesizing something like the text being "a forgotten language [in] an unknown script designed specifically for ethnic group having no their script of their own" is all to often used as an excuse to ignore, dismiss, or otherwise fail/refuse to engage with the actual, concrete statistical properties of the text. It isn't.

Well, I would say that in the first place such hypothesizing goes ahead of even considering the statistical properties of the text. We have seen many such examples. E.g. late prof. Bax (who was not some enthusiast amateur but a prominent linguist and whose 2014 article first attracted my attention to the VMS) did not seem to have considered statistical properties when he issued the said paper - and he was much criticized for that by the VMS-research veterans. I am far from linguistics and do not know whether statistics are or are not the second nature of a modern linguist. I think there is computational linguistics which revolves around statistics, but probably there are other flavours of linguistics which are statistics-unaware. People with linguistics background may comment on this, whether I'm right or wrong.

My own story was that I did not think about statistics at all when I read that paper of Stephen's (although I'm a technical guy and understand what the stuff is about). It was not until I got a bit acquainted with the VMS research history, mostly through web resources of Nick and Rene, that I began to consider the VMS text from the stats perspective.

Robert's posts on his Goodreads page (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) regarding the papers from the Malta conference are thoughtful and well worth reading.

I've been damned busy, not only had to miss the conference, but even did not approach the conference papers yet...