Harvard physicist's take on the VMS

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Here we have a manuscript whose labels are ridiculously short, text is unlike any other of its time/place, and if it's a cipher, it's totally anachronistic. Ciphers of this time relied on simple substitution or multiple alphabets, increasing entropy, rather unconstrained morphology, 1:1 word mapping for the most part. You'd have to jump ~70 years past the C14 dating to have Trithemius putting forward novel methods of encryption. ...Gibberish is a perfectly valid explanation

You are right that a complex cipher would be anachronistic (if we assume that the text was written shortly after those cows surrendered their life for the progress of science).  

But a complex gibberish generation method that was stable and produced complex but well-defined word structure, with many statistics compatible with those of a natural language (Zipf's law, lexicon size, entropy per word...) would be even more anachronistic.  Statistics and probability theory were some 150-200 years in the future.  Devices that could implement such a method with stable probability distributions at a convenient speed were 500 years in the future.

... plants are difficult to match to other herbal traditions,  ... hundreds of nymphs ... the red-berry plant that's apparently repeated 2-3 times in the VMS [but has no] internal consistency at the text level.

These features of the illustrations do not imply that the text is gibberish.  If anything, the opposite: why would the author choose those illustrations -- which are unrthodox but mostly "boring" -- instead of illustrations that would make the book more attractive, like a man making gold or walking over fire or in bed with a dozen nymphs? 

almost no marginalia notes in Voynichese, addenda or corrections made by the author(s) except for rare (read: very rare) occasions of clear glyph replacement or a squeezed in line in one of the later quires.

Marginal notes on a book are usually added by later owners.  The VMS probably left the Author shortly after it was written.  And he may well have been unable to read those tiny letters himself (like Marci and many elderly people of the time) because of failing eyesight.  (Which could also help explain why he recruited an incompetent Scribe to create the vellum version, instead of doing it himself).

No clear punctuation

I gather that punctuation was still somewhat of a novelty at the time.

[isolated] Folded bifolia instead of [quires with multiple bifolia]

The MS Scribe clearly had no experience with producing a book.  I bet that he did not realize that, when creating a book from a pile of blank sheets, one must write the pages in a complicated order: first write page 1 on the right half of a sheet, turn it over, write page 2 on the left half, repeat this for 3 more sheets with pages 3--8, then write page 9 on the same sheet as page 8, to the right of it, turn that sheet over, write page 10 on the left half, besides page 7, then repeat this with the three other sheets, in reverse order, and finally write page 15 on the right half of the first sheet, next to page 2,  then flip that sheet over and write page 16 on the left half, besides page 1. 

I bet that he just wrote one complete bifolio at a time.  Apparently he was smart enough to write the four pages in such a way that, when the bifolio was folded, the pages were 1-2-3-4 in the normal reading order.  But when the bifolios were nested into quires for binding, the page order got all messed up.  That did not matter for most sections; but the Zodiac pages had to be bound as single-bifolio quires, because the page order was obvious even to someone who could not read the text.

Relatively short amount of text (when entropy-corrected) 

What do you mean? Short compared to what?

Short labels re-used with no clear pattern between nymphs/stars/plants. No surviving tables in the Astrological section. No apparent numbers or formulaic sentences like "Caldo in 2o grado", "So nim ... und verbrenn ... bis zum ..." & whatnot, no evident links to humoral theory in most of the ms ... the few plant labels that re-appear in Pharma [do not appear] in the Herbal sections. ... no word order. Did I mention text patterns are consistent with human gibberish? (Gask. & Bow.)

These observations too do not imply that the text is gibberish.  They may well follow from the contents being not yet another rehashing of some established European lore and manuscript genera, but either is some completely original creation or is drawn from some non-European culture. Like the Rohonc Codex, or the Book of Soyga.  Or like the Rodia towers are to architecture, or the Costa Rica stone spheres are to Mesoamerican archaeology, or those dodecahedral thingies to Roman archaeology...

Again, those "bizarre" features of the text can be used to argue against the "gibberish" theory.  Namely, even if the Author wanted to make the pseudo-language of his fake book look exotic, he would probably have unconsciously followed some text patterns of European books of that genre.  He would probably have added nonsense tables, distinctive words that looked like numbers, etc. 

Anyway, as you may have noticed, I found a book that matches the Starred section surprisingly well, including all the "bizarre" statistics and word structure, the apparent absence of grammar and function words, no punctuation, no numerals, no reference to humors theory,  repetitiousness, etc etc.  But that is the topic of another thread...

confidently dismissing research without glancing at it just because the conclusion isn't to one's liking is not how it works.

It is not how it should work in an ideal world where everybody has infinite time and stamina.  But in practice that is just how it works, and must work.  I don't try to check the arguments of articles that claim to prove that Earth-is-flat or vaccines-cause-autism or btcoin-is-better-than-money.  I am quite convinced that those conclusions are wrong, so my expectation of benefit-minus-cost for reading them is strictly negative.  You too will do the same with articles that make those or other claims -- don't you?

All the best, --stolfi