My interest in the Voynich manuscript is at the trivia level. Since you are much more keen on having a discussion, perhaps you could share your perspective on the Voynich portal assertions regarding Cheshire’s interpretation?
The Voynich portal analyzes snippets of the proposed Cheshire translation. It was not sufficiently convincing for me to prompt the purchase of either the original Romance Studies article or the book.
Moreover, Cheshire published another short paper in 2019 paper providing his own description of the approach (link)
This article answers frequent inquiry about how the solutions were found for the writing system and language of Medieval manuscript MS408, as described in the peer-reviewed Romance Studies journal paper titled: The Language and Writing System of MS408 (Voynich) Explained. (Cheshire, 2019) As finding the solutions was largely intuitive, then explaining how it was done is something of a challenge in and of itself.
The first detail is that no effort was invested in researching previous attempts by other scholars, working on the simple logic that they must already have covered all possible combinations of potential letter symbols and languages, given that so many had tried over so many years. It was therefore possible to reason that the solution required an intuitive approach. So, the starting point was to consider the manuscript afresh, with an open mind, unpolluted by the ideas of others or any prior linguistic rules. The metaphorical canvas was left entirely blank to allow complete freedom and flux in ideas and thought experimentation.
It’s a short 5 page read that left me thinking the author’s claim his interpretation is correct is very thin. What the reader would have to consider to be true is that “lateral thinking” and a “presumption of the mundane” are sufficient for “solving” a manuscript that stumped many other generations of linguists. Possible? Maybe. Likely? I don’t know, it seems like a fairly extraordinary claim that would require some level of extraordinary evidence.
But I am interested in learning what is your take on the validity of Cheshire’s approach. Paleography is nowhere near my area of expertise and I am always curious about new things.
In conclusion, the writing system and language were explained and identified by deploying a logical and systematic approach in combination with experimentation, extensive research, lateral thinking, intuition and, lastly, a presumption of the mundane. That final point is important as it constrained ideas entirely to using the available information (data). That is, it eliminated any temptation to imagine information and connections that were not present.
Avoidance of both confirmation bias and negation bias is part of the scientific discipline, so that results can be considered impartial. The aim is to arrive at the most likely explanation, rather than unequivocal acceptance or rejection of the hypotheses that comprise a theory. In that light, the described explanation for the writing system and language seems to be correct based on many thousands of experiments and associated cross-reference. Above all else, application of theory and method consistently produces reasonable translations, which is the objective of any translation technique. After all, we unthinkingly do the same when we read text using a more familiar writing system and language, such as the text on this page.