The Voynich Ninja

Something Emma wrote You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. took me back to one of my minor courses at university, comparative linguistics. It was mostly an introduction to the discipline and its history rather than actual comparative linguistics. Anyway, one of the things I found most fascinating was the reason why we obtained grammars and descriptions of many unique languages of native tribes.

That reason is the belief that every human must learn about Jesus.

Missionaries had no way to communicate with these people. Their language was unknown to the outside world, and vice versa. So they would go there, integrate into the tribe, and learn their language by pointing and asking for bits of vocabulary, building from there. Even though I think teaching native tribes about the crucifixion of a Jew and his resurrection 2000 years ago is an absurd and unnecessary ambition, these missionaries and their grammars provided a treasure of information for comparative linguistics.

In the Middle Ages there were also missionaries, and they also had to overcome linguistic hurdles. For example, Stephen of Perm set out to convert the Komi people in Russia, speakers of an Uralic language. We know that in 1372, he introduced You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. This script was based on Cyrillic and Greek, but also included Komi "runes", the inclusion of which "aided the script to greater acceptance among the medieval Permic speakers of the time."

The fact that missionaries could be driven to the creation of scripts is new to me, but in a way it makes sense. You want to find acceptance with the local populace, so you might look for something in the middle ground between what you know and what they know. A script that works for you and finds connection to the mainstream, but in which they also recognize something of their own.

I am not opposed to Emma's idea of a culture's emerging literacy, but what I find even more appealing is the idea of someone trying to write a language foreign to him, which he only knows in spoken form. This is a good way to lose some entropy, because he may not recognize all minimal pairs. Native speakers on the other hand, are by definition masters of their language.

So why no Bible? Well, the region to be converted would be non-Christian. If it was hostile to foreign religions or disapproved of the depiction of realistic human figures, it might be wise to disguise one's writings as a book of natural science or what have you.

Well, one would probably make his mind at least as to whether to write top-to-bottom ot bottom-to-top before engaging into writing for those to be converted.

Here we return to the problematic points of the natural language theory. The use case is the secondary thing, the primary thing is to show that it's viable.

This Wiki page is full of interesting bits You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I am surprised at how early some entries are.

• 635 – First Christian missionaries (Nestorian monks, including Alopen, from Asia Minor and Persia) arrive in China
  

That's only 140 years after the conversion of Clovis! And 100 years before Boniface felled Odin's oak in Germany. While much of Europe was still pagan, they were building churches in China.



In the later Middle Ages, we have things like:

• 1276 – Ramon Llull opens training center to send missionaries to North Africa
  
• 1291 – Appointment of first indigenous bishop in Finland
  
• 1294 – Franciscan Giovanni di Monte Corvino arrives in China
  
• 1321 – Jordanus, a Dominican friar, arrives in India as the first resident Roman Catholic missionary
  
• 1323 – Franciscans make contacts on Sumatra, Java, and Borneo
  
• 1326 – Chaghatayid Khan Ilchigedai grants permission for a church to be built in Samarkand, Uzbekistan
  
• 1400 – Scriptures translated into Icelandic
  
• 1408 - Spanish Dominican Vincent Ferrer begins a ministry in Italy in which it is said that thousands of Jews and Muslims were won to faith in Christ
  
• 1410 – Bible is translated into Hungarian
  

So I guess if we are looking into contact between Latins and an "exotic" language, missions are a good candidate.

Thanks Koen. This is one of the two scenarios that I had in mind (the other being trade/diplomacy contact). See the Codex Cumanicus for something like the latter.

There are a huge number of examples where Christian missionaries either inventing new scripts for languages or encouraging literacy in existing scripts. English itself is one example: runes were only sporadically used for writing before the introduction of Christianity around 600.

It would explain a number of things about the Voynich text, such as the outward similarity of some glyphs to those used to write Latin and the general left to right/top to bottom order. I've also considered that one of the scribes might not have been a native speaker. This is speculation, but it's worth noting that the earliest text in Finnish is by a non-native.

The thing I find most fascinating is that the script shows some signs of deliberate design. I've tried to find out what kind of linguistic knowledge a priest or clerk would have had at the time but it's not been possible. The Greeks certainly knew enough about speech sounds to design a rational system for a script. How much a medieval priest would have known about Greek linguistics is another matter.

I love the idea that Voynichese was a script developed by missionaries to write a new language. I don't think that was the case, but I find the idea attractive and in a very broad sense plausible given a different context.