The Voynich Manuscript: Understanding the Untranslatable with Lisa Fagin Davis

[Torsten]

Like I said, I've disagreed with her on some things too and haven't hesitated to say so. But the problem here is the persistent adversarial responses on issues that you know perfectly well remain open. And without offereng any new evidence or new reasoning on the matters.

Lisa’s judgments may be debatable, but so are yours. IMO, it would be more respectable to criticize claims with an aim to clarify the evidence and move the understanding of the various issues forward, not simply to create another occasion for a public denunciation of someone who hasn't bought into all of your own assessments.

Andre, you write that I should "criticize claims with an aim to clarify the evidence and move the understanding forward" and that I do so "without offering any new evidence or new reasoning."

Several of the issues I raise are not open questions. Whether a vowel-consonant separation exists was tested by Guy (1991) and Reddy & Knight (2011) — it does not. Whether Zipf's Law proves meaning was addressed by Bowern — it does not. Whether the entropy is compatible with natural language was measured by Bennett (1976), Stallings (1998), and Lindemann & Bowern (2021) — it is not. These are published results, not debatable opinions.

When Davis states on a podcast that "it seems to be most closely related to some kind of Indo-European language," the appropriate scholarly response is to ask for the published source. If no such source exists, that is worth documenting — regardless of how many times the question has to be asked.

You are right that I scrutinize Davis's and Bowern's claims more closely than those of other researchers. The reason is proportionality. Davis publishes as Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America, presents at international conferences, appears on television and podcasts reaching million viewers, and uses the Beinecke Library at Yale as a platform (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Bowern publishes as Professor of Linguistics at Yale in high-profile journals like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Their claims are cited uncritically by other researchers — as your own paper demonstrates by accepting Davis 2020 without examination. In my eyes the scrutiny should match the reach and the authority behind the claim.

Regarding constructive engagement: your own paper "Subtle Signs of Scribal Intent" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) analyzes position-dependent token distributions in the Voynich manuscript — tokens at line starts, line ends, and adjacent to drawings. These positional effects were discussed in Timm 2014 and Timm & Schinner 2020. Your paper does not cite either. Citation choices in scholarship are never neutral — they show whom one acknowledges as a participant in the conversation and whom one excludes.