116v

[tavie]

As I wrote before, I believe that the reason why no progress was made in the decipherment of the text in 600 years is that everybody jumped to the wrong conclusions about the language and contents, precisely because they tacitly but wrongly assumed that a certain mountain of evidence that has been collected was relevant to those questions.

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 The assumption that it does, which practically every non-crank Voynichologist has made, leads to a dead end: "The stats of the text say that it is natural language, and the historical and physical evidence implies that the language is European, but since the stats don't fit those of European languages or a simple encoding thereof, it must be some very complicated cipher."  My point is that the "implies" in this reasoning is a fatal logical error. 

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Yes, there has been tons of very good work.  But what progress has resulted from it?  Has it led to the decipherment of a single word?  Or to any definite conclusion about the language and/or the "encryption" method?

I feel I could say a lot about these statements...but I think this is a debate that needs its own thread.