I just went back three months. I can’t find a single “scientific” issue in which we disagreed. Are you sure you are not mixing me up with another poster?
I don’t understand how you could find it convincing (to any degree) when the guy hasn’t presented any significant evidence to support it.
Personally, I think the most likely explanation is that it’s a fifteenth century hoax. Someone made an esoteric looking artifact to sell to some gullible royal client. The reason that it can’t be understood is because there’s nothing to understand.
To my mind, a major feature arguing for this interpretation that few (maybe none) of the many plants illustrated in the MS can be unequivocally identified. If it’s a herbal, it’s an extraordinarily bad one. How could someone, supposedly an expert, illustrate so many plants, and not get a single one right? I think the answer is that the illustrator was just making shit up, like whoever wrote the text. This is supported by several plants apparently being composites of real plants.
Indeed, the hoax hypothesis is possible. But it is awful old for that. Still, certainly possible. So far it is the hypothesis that makes the most sense.
However, the hoax idea is not a ‘solve’, in fact it is a *anti-solve. *
So far of the **SOLVES **his is the most convincing- the others are pitiful failures. Can you show me a 'solve" that is more convincing?
But we need to see his full solve before deciding.
There were plenty of hoaxes of similar or earlier vintage: The Letter of Prester John, the Shroud of Turin, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The fifteenth century had a huge appetite for esoterica.
The fact that there is no solution is in fact a solution. It makes all the “solves” unnecessary and irrelevant.
From what he’s presented, his “solve” is a pitiful failure as well. As has been noted, it results in Latin that doesn’t make sense, and as far as I can see the hypothesis is absurd on the face of it. You still haven’t addressed the problem of how complex information could be imparted using only a few dozen words.
True, there were some whoppers.
Well, I don’t consider the hoax hypothesis a “solve” here. Perhaps it’s a definitional issue. You are not deciphering the manuscript if you say it can’t be deciphered.
I will wait for his full solution. Either he has one or he hasn’t. If he does, then let’s see. if he doesn’t then he’s just another bullshitter.
When someone does publication via press release, that is usually a Very Bad Sign.
I know nearly nothing of the Voynich & Voynich-ers/-istas.
The comments earlier about it possibly being abbreviated Latin but with insufficient distinct vocabulary words make me think of another idea. It’s written in a Latin syllabery.
Said another way, the manuscript is written in shorthand. The systemus Greggus perhaps? 
It’s possible, but can you decode the system of shorthand, and actually get a sensible translation out of it? If not, then saying “it’s shorthand” basically accomplishes nothing at all.
I suspect that if the code was that simple and obvious it would have been decoded long ago.
As I understand his theory, the manuscript is similar to other medieval formularies in that it basically says something like “mnth pn 4oz d5 2oz k17 prep 46fr e7d”. Full of abbreviations, with recurring ingredients and preparation processes written only once in an index and simply footnoted in the formulas, to save paper and scribe labour. While the abbreviations might be puzzled out, without the missing index containing the links to the repeated information identified by the codes it cannot be translated in any meaningful way. With the index, you might get something like “For monthly pain, take 4 oz of powdered willow bark and 2 oz of root of blackberry soaked in wine, and grind into a paste with a little beer, administer a pea’s worth twice daily.”.
He hasn’t provided a translation because he believes no valid translation is currently possible.
Such a claim is at least easily falsifiable on a purely textual basis : compare the statistics (word frequency, entropy, autocorrelation, etc) of known formularies in known languages with those of the Voynich MS. If they do not match, there is a problem. No need for the “missing” codebook for this.
ETA the Voynich manuscript is not all recipes. I wonder what he makes of the plant labels, for example? Don’t hold your breath until he publishes his results.
Evidently my weak joke-telling isn’t very decodable either. Sorry. 
The explanation that they are abbreviations still doesn’t get around the problem that there are so few symbols. Even Bookkeeper’s single example contains more than 25 distinct words, which would account for almost all the common symbols. You would need many more to compose dozens of plant accounts and recipes. And even if these are abbreviations specific to the formulation of herbal medicines, there are large sections apparently on astronomical or cosmological subjects. These would undoubtedly require different abbreviations. Gibbs proposal just doesn’t make any logical sense.
I can understand the desire for an index, or other methods of encoding, to save on the labor and materials. However, to spend the time and energy to be fluent in a new method of short-hand/encoding for each and every manuscript would be as costly if not more costly than simply writing the whole word out that one time.
So, there’s something else out that that matches this, or, as it appears via statistical analysis, this is just some gibberish. Maybe the author was near the end and was slightly senile?
The astronomical sections might be more recipes, just even further encoded. It was common for alchemists to use astronomical notation to obscure their work (the use of the name “mercury” for quicksilver is one remnant of this), and I can imagine that a pharmacist might have done the same.
But that’s still just one possibility out of many, and I’m not saying I endorse it.
My point is that they would not use the same terms, and hence the same codes, as herbals. As far as I know, most of the common “letters” appear in the various sections. I suppose the same letter might have a different meaning in different sections, but then we’re getting into an even more cumbersome system.
What an interesting puzzle.
I am struck by Montemurro’s argument, as stated on the wikipedia page:
That strikes me as a pretty good argument against the hoax hypothesis. Is there some obvious problem with it? Or is the hoax hypothesis just the logical end of eliminating all the impossible answers, however unlikely it may be itself?
Here’s Montemurro’s article. He finds that particular “words” tend to cluster in particular sections of the MS. But the commonalities don’t always make sense. The Herbal section and Pharmacological sections share many words, as would be expected, but so do the Recipes and Astrological sections, which would not seem to have such an obvious relationship in subject.
I don’t think such clustering by itself would rule out a hoax. The text is not necessarily completely random. I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to think that the writer could have sprinkled similar words in sections with similar illustrations. This would even be possible if the writer’s use of certain “words” shifted over time, and (say) he worked on the Herbal and Pharmacological sections at the same time, and did other sections later.
I had the impression that the evidence of natural language went beyond common words in different sections. Isn’t there also evidence based on where certain character combinations appear in words, frequencies, etc? Or do they all also break down to fairly simple tricks on close examination?
People believe what they want to believe and find patterns in randomness. I remember a case, several years back, where someone on this board pointed out a painting on the sides of a canyon wall and declared that it showed evidence of early perspective in art. If one actually looked at the work, honestly, it wasn’t too hard to demonstrate that this was not the case.
(See discussion starting at post 28.)
I’d suggest, for example, that there are a few new “words” introduced every page of the Voynich Manuscript but this one guy is seeing the words that show up mid-chapter as ‘words which simply didn’t happen to come up yet in the language’ and the new words which show up at the start of the chapter as ‘words which the chapter is about’. Because he is classifying the new words into two separate buckets in his head, the argument is logical and honest in his mind, yet an analysis of words being used by page would show that the spread of new words is homogeneous and does not spike at the start of each chapter.