Voynich Decoded

[Koen G]

That's not quite what I meant to convey in my email. There was criticism, which you may have missed.

Let me try to explain.

I signed an NDA, but on the condition that I could make general remarks which don't give away the system. Nothing I will say can allow someone to replicate the method.

The good:

• Not the usual simple substitution cipher we see so often. It's not shockingly out of the box, but a breath of fresh air nonetheless.
  
• Repeatable and consistent, little to none wiggling to make it work. At least in the current iteration. The method was explained clearly, and with the provided information, I could start converting text.
  
• The method ignores Latin grammar, but in a way I find entirely unproblematic.
  

However, there are big issues, which I will attempt to explain as well as possible without being specific.

• Misuse or misunderstanding of EVA. This part alone undermines the whole system.
  
• Entirely based on arbitrary choices. If different choices had been made, we could still read the MS, but it would say something else entirely (in an equally weird way). The method allows one to make thousands of vastly different translations, without any way of telling which one is superior. The MS can be whatever you want it to be. The only reason why I call the method repeatable, is that the choices have been made by the solver, so I could replicate those.
  
• A "worldview" (using general term here) is then invented for the author in an attempt to make sense of the resulting translation. But it's still bizarre. And the evidence becomes circular. Why is your translation problematic? Because the author was doing this and that. How do we know that? Well, just look at my translation.
  
• The method takes a specific known issue with Voynichese text and makes it many times worse, to an absurd degree. I won't say which issue, but it's bad.
  

Needless to say, I don't believe the MS has been solved, nor that it will be solved by this method.