(27-06-2020, 11:24 AM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Indeed, some people are putting far too much weight on what is a relatively casual introduction to the Voynich manuscript.
Lisa Davis writes her articles as the executive director of the Medieval Academy of America. Therefore I wouldn't dismiss something Lisa wrote as unimportant. Also the Manuscripts society does "promote the highest professional and ethical standards" (see You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.). Moreover I really want to understand what Lisa means "with linguistically identifiable roots, prefixes, and suffixes" and "repeating grammatical patterns". If the patterns Lisa Davis describes would exist they would indicate indeed a natural human language. I'm pretty sure that Lisa Davis wouldn't describe a pattern out of thin air and maybe Lisa refers to a pattern all other researchers have overlocked and opens this way a new avenue of research.
In the Washington post article it is written as an introduction: "with what
appear to be roots, prefixes and suffixes as well as repeating spelling and grammatical patterns." (You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.). But within the last year the word "appear" has disappeared. Moreover the reader reads sentences like: "An acceptable proposal must result in a reading that makes sense semantically, chronologically, and logically" (Davis 2020, p. 82) in the context of the introduction. There is no doubt what the intention is, especially since Lisa explicitly writes "Hundreds of people have studied the Voynich in the last few decades alone, and much of that work does add productively to the conversation, especially the computational linguistic analyses" (You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view., p. 82).
Anyway, Lisa says "There is a responsibility to be straightforward about the reality" (You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.) and demands: "Researchers owe it to their readers, and themselves, to review what others have done (and cite them accordingly), pursue threads that seem promising, and abandon avenues that have been proven to be dead ends" (Davis 2020, p. 82).