The Voynich Manuscript: Understanding the Untranslatable with Lisa Fagin Davis

[Torsten]

Thank you, I agree with you absolutely. This is a podcast. It isn't a peer-reviewed essay or a conference lecture. It's a public-facing informal podcast, so while we should all take pains to be cautious in how we speak about the VMS, we also need to consider the context and audience of any presentation or publication.

My point was not that you should provide references in a podcast. My point is that several of your statements do not seem to represent the current state of Voynich research — and I would like to understand what they are based on.

The format question is easy to resolve: if the published sources supporting statements like "It's almost certainly not Asian. It's almost certainly not African." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and "It seems to be most closely related to some kind of Indo-European language, but we just don't know yet which one" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) exist, could you point to them here?

Note: Your argument about the language family is based on the observation that "consonants and vowels, which every language has" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). It is important to distinguish between languages and writing systems: for instance Hebrew is a Semitic language with consonants and vowels like any other language — but the Hebrew script is an abjad that writes mostly consonants. If someone enciphered a Hebrew text, a search for separate vowel and consonant characters would fail — not because Hebrew language lack vowels but because the writing system used to write Hebrew does not represent them as separate characters.

You write that you do not ever claim to know what the manuscript is. But to say "It seems to be most closely related to some kind of Indo-European language, but we just don't know yet which one." is an identification — whether or not the word "is" is used. I'm concerned that people will spend time trying to decode the text as Indo-European and refer to a statement by the Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America as evidence for their language identification. That is why the published basis for your statements matters in my eyes.