The Voynich Manuscript: Understanding the Untranslatable with Lisa Fagin Davis

[asteckley]

You write that I "know full well the many reasons why Davis holds a fairly common opinion that it seems to be Indo-European." I would be interested to hear what those many reasons are and where they are published.

Really?  I mean are you really interested?  
Ok, let's see what our AI friend has to say about why Davis' and many others might hold that opinion:

• Historical and codicological prior. The parchment dates to the early fifteenth century, and Yale describes the manuscript as a Central European production. Its physical construction, script direction, page design, subject divisions, zodiacal imagery, and herbal, medical, astronomical, and pharmaceutical genres place it in a European manuscript environment. Most written vernaculars in that environment were Indo-European, as was Latin, the transregional scholarly language.
  

• Alphabetic and scribal appearance. The text runs left to right, is divided by spaces into word-like units, and uses an inventory of roughly alphabetic scale. Several glyph components resemble Latin scribal forms or abbreviation signs, although the script as a whole has not been derived securely from any known alphabet.
  

• Language-like organization. Word frequencies, repeated forms, positional regularities, page-level vocabularies, topic structure, and the association between morphological similarity and co-occurrence are difficult to reduce to independent random marks. These findings support an organized message or at least a highly structured generative system. They do not by themselves identify Indo-European.
  

• Morphological profile. Luke Lindemann’s broad comparison of Voynichese with 160 languages found that the closest family-level profiles were mostly Indo-European. Iranian ranked first for the full manuscript and for both Currier varieties; Germanic ranked second for the full text and Currier B; Indic and Romance also ranked highly. This is the most direct quantitative reason for preferring an Indo-European candidate, though it rests on only two surface measures and cannot identify a particular language.
  

• Inflection-like families of forms. Voynichese tokens often appear as related series with recurrent beginnings, endings, and internal slots. Their distribution resembles a moderately morphologically complex language more than a radically isolating or extremely agglutinative one. That profile is compatible with many Indo-European languages, especially if the script, spelling, or cipher suppresses distinctions.
  

• European-language traces around the main script. The zodiac pages carry later month names in a Romance variety, and marginal annotations use Latin letters and have repeatedly been read through Latin, German, or Romance. These additions reveal the linguistic milieu through which the codex passed; they are not a direct identification of the main text.
  

• Feasibility under transformation. Recent cipher experiments show that Latin or Italian can be converted by a historically plausible verbose homophonic system into text with several Voynich-like statistics. This does not decipher the manuscript, but it answers one objection: an Indo-European plaintext need not retain ordinary Indo-European character entropy after encipherment.
  

To be clear, I don't myself consider the question of Indo-European origins to be settled, despite all of the above -- there are also counter-arguments. But let's not pretend that after so many years of researching the Voynich and studying the material as you have done, that anything in the above list is actually new information to you. As I said, "you know full well".

You write that my observation about citation choices reveals my "motivations." It was a general observation about scholarly practice. Your response — that you omitted my work because of its publication venue — illustrates the point rather well.

I assume you did not use AI in writing that. Because whatever point you are trying to make there is unclear.