I don't see a lot of "why" in this supposed solution. If what the author says is true, it sounds like an incredibly painstaking process to encode all of this, especially when it was something so tedious (it would make more sense if the source material were interesting or salacious!). I can sort of understand abbreviating the long plant names to individual symbols, referenced from an index, and I can understand ligatures for things like "etiam", but why make each and every single character represent a whole word? Surely the end result is that the manuscript, even with the index, becomes very, very hard to read?<p>And is there a good explanation for why this document apparently stands alone in history as the only manuscript written in this way? Were there others, and we just lost them? Was this just a particularly egregious example of this forgotten art, and others written in this manner were easier to decipher? Lastly, there's a whole Wikipedia page about "scribal abbreviations" - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation</a> - if decoding the Voynich manuscript were so easy as the author makes out ("It became obvious...") then why has some other medieval expert not already figured it out in the near-century people have been studying this manuscript?