[Article] The Voynich Manuscript: A Non-Stochastic Glossolalia

[cecilp]

I find it strange that they don't mention the possibility that the vms is a cypher in their opening paragraph, leading them to conclude that it must be a hoax/glossolalia. Unless they count cyphers under natural language or constructed language, which makes little sense to me, since cyphers don't have the same characteristics as natural languages. Also, having a few of the statistic properties of glossolalia doesn't discount the possibility of it being a cypher or having some meaning, even if it's hidden in the form of code or steganography.

My second criticism is that they make several unjustified assumptions about the text, such as that each voynich letter is a plaintext letter/phoneme, which is not necessarily the case. Especially for 'f', which might not be phonetic at all because of how it's usually only on the first line of paragraphs (which they don't mention in the paper). Additionally, the h2 value of voynichese is entirely dependent on the transcription used, and some transcriptions even have a higher h2 than european languages. So the statistics of the text are only similar to glossolalia if you use Eva, which is unlikely to be an accurate transcription of the text's phonemes.