(13-09-2026, 03:01 PM)asteckley wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- 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.
When you apply any metric to an unknown text, you will always find a closest match. But a closest match is not an identification. For instance You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (2016) identified Hebrew as closest match. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (2022) did found Iranian as closest match. But he also hedges his result by writing: "While character-level measures mark Voynichese as a complete outlier among historical European manuscripts, the word-level measures for Voynich place it comfortably between the Old Slavonic and Hebrew historical texts on one side and the Italian and Welsh texts on the other."
Anyway, it is interesting that you see the linguistic results of Tiltman, Bennett, Friedmann, Currier, D'Imperio, Stallings, Reddy & Knight, and Bowern & Lindemann as debatable opinions about "open questions" while pointing to non-language-related arguments like 'European manuscript environment' as counter-arguments.