A while back I can across a very interesting blog post by a linguist (Peter Bakker, an expert on creole languages) offering thoughts on the MS 408 text from a linguistic perspective (You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. -- the would-be decipherer he refuses to name is clearly Cheshire...). His conclusion is that "If it would have been a real language, in a rational and regular writing system, experts would have figured it out by now."
While I don't think Michael Coe has ever commented on the Voynich text, he's someone who has experience as a key player in the decipherment of the Mayan script. As a result, he has a good understanding of the historical prerequisites for successful decipherments of unreadable scripts, which he has articulated in a number of places as the "Five Pillars of Decipherment" (see, for instance, You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.; Zender gives a slightly revised list of the pillars in You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.). Here are the five pillars (quoted from Coe's paper on the Indus script):
"1 A large and well-published database: there should be many texts, and most of these should encode complete sentences.
"2 A known language which is encoded by the script, preferably reconstructed in phonology, grammar, and syntax to the period in which the script was in use.
"3 One or more bilingual texts, one member of which is in an already deciphered or otherwise readable script.
"4 A well-understood cultural context to aid in the understanding and reading of the texts.
"5 If the script is logographic or logo-syllabic, there should be accompanying pictorial references (as there are in Egyptian and Classic Maya) to apply to the texts.
"Even texts written in an alphabetic system can be difficult to understand if some of these conditions are not met; consider Etruscan, which violates no. 2 in this list - although we can read Etruscan inscriptions (since the alphabet is very similar to the Greek), they are not readily intelligible.[....]"
Looking at the "pillars" in the context of the Voynich mss.:
Pillar #1 (large database): While there is only one "text", the total length of the manuscript text is fairly large. If there is a meaningful underlying text, it is unclear that the entire codex is in a single natural language (or cipher system/key as the case may be) -- as Bowern & Lindemann observe (You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.), "Although there is some overlap, the most common vocabulary items of Voynich A and Voynich B are substantially different. While the words in both languages are built from the same three-field structure, they do not clearly correspond to each other. They might be the result of different encoding processes, or they might represent different underlying natural languages." Even so, given the volume of text just the Herbal A dialect pages or the Bio B pages would seem to provide ample material to work with.
Pillar #2 (known language): What Coe means here isn't simply that the underlying language is attested somewhere. He's talking about the way the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics leveraged the assumption that non-Egyptian names were transcriptions of Greek names using the phonetic values of the characters, and that the texts as a whole were in a language closely related to Coptic; or the way the decipherment of Linear B leveraged the assumption that the underlying language was an early form of Greek; or the way the decipherment of the Mayan script leveraged the assumption that the underlying language was closely related to the Conquest-era spoken Mayan language. It would be fair to say there is no consensus regarding any underlying natural language (whether enciphered or not).
Pillar #3 (bilingual texts): Yeah...we don't have that. 'Nuf said.
Pillar #4 (cultural context): Unfortunately, we don't have much certainty about that. The bulk of the analysis of the imagery that has been done has focused (understandably in light of Pillar #5) on trying to identify the plant images; there has been much more limited published art historical analysis of the other imagery. Diane O'Donovan has written extensively on the subject, and hopefully will follow through on her current plan to submit several papers describing her views for publication -- as someone who isn't an art historian by training, I'd like to see other professional art historians engage with her views on the subject. Others such as Koen Gheuens have mapped specific motifs over a more limited European range. It's very unfortunate that we don't have any visibility into the content of Martina Pippal's recent course on the subject at the University of Vienna.
Pillar #5 (accompanying pictorial references): In principle, we have those. The plants would seem to offer the most likely leverage point -- efforts to identify the plant drawings go back to Ethel Voynich and Theodore Petersen; Jorge Stolfi put forward an argument that the first word of the herbal pages was likely the plant name (You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.). Unfortunately, efforts to use the plant drawings as cribs haven't worked (at least partly because many of the plant identifications are uncertain or contested).
So, in summary -- yes on Pillar #1, no on Pillars #2 & #3, unclear at best on Pillar #4, and in principle a yes on Pillar #5. Looked at through the lens of Coe's pillars it's not all that surprising the text (if there is one) hasn't been read.
Karl