Voynich manuscript: the solution?

"...one British academic claims..."

"Nicholas Gibbs, who is an expert on medieval medical manuscripts,...."

"Mr Gibbs, who claims to be a professional history researcher..."

The punch line of one of his stories came while he was discussing the history of attempts to interpret it. One character had a dense theory that involved, as a step in the middle, involved the text being an anagram. The problem being that anagramming destroys information and, given a large enough text, is impossible to reverse. (Interestingly, this is why some 17th-18th century scientists who were obsessed with both secrecy and precedence published their results in anagram form---if someone later came along and published the same result, they could say, "See, I was first; here's what that gibberish means.")

My point being that if you're going to posit an "out-there" theory, you have to make sure your theory can get you back here.

For a short text, you may have a point, but for a text as large as the Voynich, information content is a pretty reasonable way to examine what's going on. The number of characters (as far as I know (http://www.voynich.nu/transcr.html)) is within the range of alphabetic writing. (Alphabets have To have more bits per character, the document would have to have more different characters. To pack more bits in via position, for example, would be possible, but you can't go crazy with the idea because you still need to be able to decrypt it. (Hangul is a neat example; it's alphabetic, but written with the letters arranged into blocks representing syllables. Neat!)

It is not at all, you misunderstand the point.

It is the technique that codebreakers used to check whether something is linguistic or not. And it is rather consistent across all languages. The 'Alphabet size' of a string might vary (i.e. logographic languages have much higher symbolic vocabulary sizes, so different per-symbol information content), but that doesn't affect the overall information density, because those symbols also take more information to encode. I haven't done the analysis myself, but as I understand it, Voynich is way way outside the range of normal human languages, European or otherwise.

And raising the issue of logographic or syllabic systems, is a point I made (did you not understand they are your examples). Even if one argued (as some have done) that the symbols in Voynich are logographic or syllabic, that would make it even lower information density, even further from human language.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear, but this stuff is very well-established in the Voynich literature. It puts genuine constraints over what the language can contain. It doesn't mean it's gibberish, but it is very unlikely to be 'real writing' derived from any known language, extant or extinct. Crucially, if it is real writing, it is of a form so dramatically different to anything we've ever seen before (i.e. fundamentally different syntactic and semantic structures), that one suspects the kind of correspondence translation techniques in the videos will be futile.