

Analysis of the Botany, Zoology, and Mineralogy of the Voynich Manuscript (2013) - smikhanov
http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue100/hg100-feat-voynich.html?ts=1390488690&signature=3537230b1c1407ede2ec6622b7612b60

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sbp
This paper ignores some very basic features of the VMS. The Ghibelline merlons
on f86v, for example, show that the manuscript was produced with knowledge of
northern Italian castles. Tucker and Talbert entirely fail to address this.

[http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#Ros/0.767/0.174/6.00](http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#Ros/0.767/0.174/6.00)

Another strong refutation is that Tucker and Talbert believe the text of the
manuscript to be a simple transliteration of Nahuatl. This has already been
effectively ruled out by Kevin Knight, who shows for example that bigram
predictability far exceeds most natural languages.

[http://www.isi.edu/natural-
language/people/voynich-11.pdf](http://www.isi.edu/natural-
language/people/voynich-11.pdf)

(Section 4.2).

It is important to note in conjunction with this that he also found that the
VMS has extremely weak word order, and that the line unit has significant
features that distinguish it from paragraph features. (Sections and 5.1 and
6.2) These features combined make it very unlikely that the VMS is as simple
as Tucker and Talbert think.

Ultimately, the VMS has remained a very tough nut to crack, even after
repeated attempts at smashing through the outer layers by several generations
of professional and amateur cryptanalysts. The longer this situation
continues, the less likely there is to be any simple solution such as we had
for the Soyga tables.

[http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/soyga.pdf](http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/soyga.pdf)

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jaybill
Thanks for posting this. I thought the linked article seemed to be making a
lot of dubious assumptions, but didn't have the references handy.

