I studied that manuscript a bit at university, and the questioner in the audience was definitely on the right track wrt the Bible being valuable as a source of

I studied that manuscript a bit at university, and the questioner in the audience was definitely on the right track wrt the Bible being valuable as a source of training data. We trained on the pre-15th century translations of the Bible in a number of languages. Off the top of my head, there was Old Church Slavonic, Vulgate Latin, Bibilical Hebrew plus a number of other languages people had proposed over the years, but the statistics from Voynich Herbal A and Herbal B were never very similar to any of the languages. The closest fit we found was for Manchu, trained using a Manchu translation of the 'Dao de Jing' which made us hopeful for Basanik's Manchu Hypothesis or a modified Proto-Manchu hypothesis (http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/04-05-20-manchu-theo/ http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/04-05-20-manchu-the...) but as we dug deeper, the n-gram frequencies ended up being wildly off. Over the years, I have been more and more doubtful that the Voynich Manuscript is natural language at all. Hopefully someone will come along and prove me wrong, but I have stopped hoping that any of these headlines is the answer for quite a while.