[Article] Harvard physicist's take on the VMS

[Koen G]

The VMs text has too many statistical properties that have not been documented in any extant specimen of human writing known to be meaningful, even on their own, let alone together. Schwartz does a decent job enumerating these properties and explaining them in plain English. The  end result is a compelling sense of just how steep a hike up Mount Improbable the apologetics for any sort of meaningful VMs is.

I agree that what we see in the manuscript is unique, and there is no immediately obvious way to see how it can be turned into something that's meaningful. But there is one leap in the logic I just cannot comprehend.

• Voynichese does not look like a straightforward representation of natural language --> agreed
  
• Moreover, it cannot be readily understood as the result of common medieval cipher methods --> agreed
  
• We don't know of anything like this --> agreed
  
• ERGO, Voynichese must be the result of a nonsense-generating algorithm performed by the medieval scribe(s) --> what? 
  

Why? Is that "more attested"? Less unusual? 

I'm probably misrepresenting some arguments here, but to me it sounds like "if this text contains meaning, it must have been done in a way that's never been done before, therefore they must have done this whole other thing that has never been done before."

Regarding the article, the least one can say is that it's not kind to the reader. It would be great to get a version of this that's written in human language.