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

[MichelleL11]

I agree this is interesting but I also agree there are some signficant issues.  

1.  This paper has not been peer reviewed.  Here is what the "about" page of the Semantics Archive says about "archiving" a paper.

Publication Status and Citations – Archiving a paper is not considered a form of publication. It is, instead, analogous to circulating a manuscript, preprint, or offprint. Because of this, it is inappropriate to include a link to a paper appearing in the Semantics Archive in a list of references in a publication.

2.  The author has not provided any means to contact him in this publication.  This is always a red flag.

3.  The References list is missing citations.  May be a minor point but revision is certainly needed to be equivalent to a published article.

4.  There is no mention of peer-reviewed Voynich publications that could be a problem for this theory (e.g. Lisa Fagin Davis' work on scribes comes to mind first).  Given the relatively small amount of academic publications on the Voynich there is a feel that publications may have been selectively cited.

5.  There is very little attempt to fit this theory into the time period of the manuscript's carbon dating.  Granted, this is mentioned as future work but this is a really big missing feature that has to be taken into account in order to make this convincing.  The conclusion is very strongly written without a pretty basic premise even attempted -- that glossolalia was culturely appropriate for this time period.  It may take collaboration to get this truly investigated but for me to be convinced there has to be some attempt in this direction.

6.  The text analysis seems superficial and observational based.  It would be more impressive if he had worked collaboratively with someone that could do the computer text analysis in a more solid (quantitative) way.  I also have the same concerns about using EVA as mentioned by cecilp for this kind of work especially in relation to comparison to transcriptions of oral expression.  Basically we've got two made up systems created for very different reasons being compared to each other.  That being said, matching patterning could be impressive -- if a way to really quantify it is figured out.

So these are my thoughts and I do hope the author does the collaborative work to help close these (pretty big) holes in the theory.