It’s Voynich time again

Which means another round of breathless headlines, as I discussed in 2017: [https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2017/08/29/speaking-of-fantastical-drawings/ ] That time the theory was that the author was an Italian Jewish doctor. This time the theory is the author was a nun who lived here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aragonese_Castle

The peer-reviewed paper [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566 ] presents a plausible case that the writing is in a “proto-romance” language with its own writing system related to Latin letters.

Unfortunately the response to “the Voynich manuscript has been cracked!” is “oh no it hasn’t!”. Ars Technica has a more sceptical article than most on the news [https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/no-someone-hasnt-cracked-the-code-of-the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript/ ] Specifically, it seems “proto-romance language” is more of a means to make matching possible labels to words i.e. find a word that matches from across any one of Europe’s Romance languages from Spanish to Romanian without requiring a consistent mapping. It also allows for borrowings from near-by languages (e.g. Slavic or Persian) — it’s plausible for a language to have such borrowings but it gives a lot of freedom for matching script to words and then “translating” the words.

There’s a longer sceptical analysis here https://voynichportal.com/2019/05/07/cheshire-recast/ [ETA: and a follow up that is even more brutal https://voynichportal.com/2019/05/16/cheshire-reprised/ ]

Way beyond my capacity to judge but the test would be in translating longer un-illustrated passages, which apparently has yet to occur.