> That implies to me that someone did some very deliberate manipulation to the way the language is written, which coincidentally made it very different from oth

> That implies to me that someone did some very deliberate manipulation to the way the language is written, which coincidentally made it very different from other natural languages at the word level. But at the same time, they included information that ultimately works the same way as other natural languages, and we can see that structure when we look at sections or pages of the manuscript. It’s a very interesting contradiction. It’s quite a puzzle! I think that the reason the Voynich Manuscript has resisted analysis for so long could be that researchers approach it with one of three assumptions: * it's a meaningless hoax * it's a natural language with a simple writing system that just needs to be learnt * it's a natural language that has been enciphered using some encryption system but what if the truth is some combination of the three? It's at least conceivable that the original writers might have been speakers of some uncommon language (perhaps one without a writing system available at the time) and they were trying to write something that they thought was meaningful, but ended up devising a writing system that wasn't practically readable, and that didn't matter to them. Perhaps their goal wasn't to deceive a buyer or troll future researchers, but merely to capture in physical form a body of work from their culture, as a performative or devotional act.