[Cryptography] The Voynich Manuscript as a product of a mental health disorder

[Ray Dillinger]

On 2/17/19 8:17 AM, Gerard Cheshire wrote:

> ______________________________________________________________________________________
> 
> 
> Hi Ben/Peter,
> 
> I've already told Cryptography list - the Voynich manuscript was written
> by a Dominican nun in perfectly ordinary language and she was entirely
> sound of mind. The writing system was solved in May 2017 and a paper
> will be formally published in 2019. In the meantime, three draft papers
> are available to freely download from the preprint linguistics website
> LingBuzz: ...

That is an interesting theory, but ...  having read the first two of
these papers, it does not seem believable to me. It would require a very
strange grammar for the language and a very strange person as author.
She would have to be a polyglot familiar with terms from a dozen
different languages, constructing sentences according to an absolutely
opaque set of grammatical rules.

Or, as it seems, by no grammatical rules at all. I cannot see any
definite structure relating the words in the sentences translated in
these papers.  The language proposed is not consistently SOV, SVO, or
VSO.  In fact a fair number of the translated sentences appear to lack
verbs entirely.  It does not seem consistently head first or head final.
 It seems to have no articles, prepositions, postpositions, or
declensions to consistently mark the use of nouns, and no conjugations
or particles to consistently mark the use of verbs. Adjectives and
adverbs appear sometimes but none seem structurally bound to any
particular precedent or antecedent noun or verb.

So I'm having a lot of trouble believing in this language.  I can't
believe in a grammar according to which there seem to be no sequences of
words which are errors.  If nothing is a non-sentence, then finding the
specific meaning of a genuine sentence is intractable.

There is another thing that would make your theory deeply troubling.
This theory would require someone to write an herbal, identifying plants
&c for medicinal use or warning of them as poisons - while consistently
drawing incorrect renditions of those plants.  This is the kind of error
that cannot be attributed to any person of good intentions. Herbals were
the closest thing people of that time had to pharmacies and getting
those illustrations right was literally a matter of life and death.
Producing an herbal while lacking that knowledge would be fraudulent,
recklessly endangering any who believed it, and criminally arrogant.
Deliberately getting it wrong would be an act of sheer malice.

Otherwise I'm not a subject matter expert; it might be the case that
there is some set of consistent grammatical rules which would indeed
verify a specific meaning for each of these sentences and also identify
most purely random sequences of words as incorrect or malformed.  It
might be the case that there were in 1440's Italy a number of people
familiar with applying this mysterious grammar to that kind of polyglot
vocabulary.  It might even be possible that there existed a nun with the
sheer arrogance, disregard for life, or even malice, to create an herbal
while knowingly drawing the plants incorrectly.  But this theoretical
grammar and this supposed author both seem too strange and too horrible
for me to accept this theory readily.

If your theory is valid, then I look forward to confirmation of this
interpretation by other scholars.  But until that time comes, I'm going
to regard it as a theory only, not particularly more believable than
many others.

				Bear



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