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

[pfeaster]

A solid refutation of glossolalia would be a property of Voynichese that is incompatible with a stream of words that can be generated quickly, at the speed of speech.

Maybe LAAFU effects? I do not expect an outpouring of glossolalia (which is like a religious experience) to take lines into account at all.

Well, I can think of one "property of Voynichese that is incompatible with a stream of words that can be generated quickly, at the speed of speech" -- namely, Voynichese (in the written form we have, and sharing the author's assumptions about the mapping of characters to speech sounds) can't physically be written quickly enough.  The characters take too long to form with the pen.  Any system for transcribing fluent glossolalia by hand would need to look more like shorthand from the nineteenth century or later -- but even then, any shorthand systems that have historically let people transcribe speech at an ordinary rate of delivery have relied on methods of abbreviation that aren't suited to transcribing arbitrary spoken sounds.  I don't believe any known system of writing, past or present, could be used to record extemporaneous rapid glossolalia at all accurately by hand, unless the transcriber had previously invented a system of abbreviation customized to fit the patterns of a specific glossolalist.  My understanding is that the formal study of glossolalia was severely hampered for this reason until the introduction of the Edison phonograph (see remarks You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., for example).

That's not to say that someone couldn't have had a glossolalist speak in discrete chunks and transcribed each chunk in turn.  If this were done line by line, and if each "session" corresponded with the start of a new paragraph, it might even have resulted in line and paragraph patterns.

But that would make for a very different kind of argument, and it would also make any statistical patterns derived from modern recordings of fluent, continuous glossolalia less suitable as points of comparison.