In that case, practically speaking, I would start looking for exactly such manuscripts: ones that represent a language that was possibly written for the first time, where the scribe may have needed to use some creativity. Did they do anything special with the script, what subject are they usually about, etc.
Unless, of course, the VM represents a unique example, a rare dialect or language that hadn't been written until the early 15thC. - which is a fair possibility. But I don't know how we could use that to our advantage, wouldn't that imply a lack of reference material as well?
Yes, the scarcity of reference material is a challenge, but luckily this is the type of challenge I like.
There are traces of such languages and we can try to track them down. Some of the dialects survive to this day, although obviously languages evolve. For others, we can find fragments of them if we look hard enough. They may give us inspiration regarding some properties of Voynichese...
Here is an example about the miners pidgin spoken from the 13thC in the Trentino area (from "The First German Mining Laws and the Archaeological Evidence", by Gerd Weisgerber, see PDF online):
“German miners with the leading skill and ability on the continent went to Trent and brought with them their sense of justice with the principles of law and their technical knowledge…
They are German words with the addition of Latin grammatical endings… a fact which sometimes makes them very difficult to understand… (emphasis mine)
Werchi = gewerke (shareholder)
Silbrarii = silbererzbergmann (silverminer)
Wassar = wascher (ore washer)
Smellzer = schmelzer (smelter)
Kenner = kenner (expert)
Gestaldio = verwalter (administrator, steward)
Xencator = senker, schachtabeufer (man sinking a shaft)
Dorslagus = durschlag (cross cut)
Xurfus = schurf (cut, trench)
Carregi or Carowego = karrenweg, forderstrecke (main drift for cart)
Sega = sage (saw)
Arcentaria = erzbergwerk (metal mine)
Xafetum = Schacht (shaft)
Rota = rad, pochwerk (grinding mill with water wheel)"
(Sorry about the font size weirdness in this post, I've been copying and pasting and it seems the message editor won't homogenize it no matter how I try).
One of my favourite anecdotes.....
When I went to "high school" (Gymnasium) I all of a sudden had to learn foreign languages like English and French (in the first year). One of the two teachers explained us that these two languages are basically similar. So we said to each other: yeah right. English and French similar? No way. Then came Latin, and German, even one year of classical Greek.
Many, many years later I started to learn Thai. It was then that I realised that this teacher was right. English and Fench are really similar, and this one was *really* different.
The point of this is, that it is not likely that the Voynich MS text is "just" a dialect of 15th C Europe, because these are not sufficiently different from the main languages. Of course, there are exceptions, usually leftovers from pre-Roman cultures such as Basque and Gaelic (languages rather than dialects of course), but there are other reasons why the Voynich MS text is not just one of them written in an invented alphabet.
In the early days of the old mailing list I "bumped into" a strange language called "Faetar". Jacquest Guy loved it. This was spoken in only one or two villages in Southern Italy, and never written down. This is one of the languages/dialects that could go on the list proposed in this thread. However, in the end this (and similar) dialects aren't *that* different from Italian.
The Voynich text is very, very different from the main European languages, so, assuming that there is a meaningful content, I see two possibilities:
1) It could be written in a very, very different language
2) It could be a common language which is rendered in a very unusual manner.
In the second case, the change is so deep (think "word pattern") that we can't distinguish the original language at all.
In that case, it could still be "just" Latin, vulgate, or some regional derivative of it. All Romance languages are sufficiently similar.
W.r.t option 1, the question remains which languages are really sufficiently different.
Greek? I don't think so. Same with Hebrew.
With the various Arabic languages I am not sure. Could be.
When it comes to Eastern Asian languages, then I would say yes.
I understand your point ReneZ, they obviously aren't as different as Thai and French, but I don't think their difference is insignificant. After all, the languages of the entire Indo-European family are "not that different" but those affinities don't mean our texts share all their properties!
I never suggested that the Voynich text was "just" a dialect (please reread my post). I don't believe it is just an unreadable lost language thing. What I suggested is the possibility encryption
of a dialect/pidgin, which adds to the difficulty.
As you can see in the example I gave with the Trentino mining language, we find a higher frequency of letters we would not expect such as words beginning with X, as well as other factors such as the one I highlighted (german words with latin grammatical endings).
Also, dialects/pidgins could very well mix some of the languages you list as "very different":
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There are many, many more.
Agreed, Rene.
If we want to test if the language is some form of dialect, the first question should be "is it Germanic", for example, or even "is it Indo-European?"
So personally I see little use in trying to figure out which rare dialect it could be, but I wish the best of luck to people who want to explore that avenue.
I lean very much towards option (2). I think it will be a language from a limited set of "common" ones, like Latin, Greek, Hebrew... but represented in a way that imposes an unusual structure on the words.
This is hard to put into words, but I don't really see it as a cipher either, even though the script is unknown. Does that make sense? Cipher sounds like the intention is to keep a secret, right? But I'm not sure if that is necessarily the case, just because we can't read it...
Koen Gh,
how do you "test" a text in unknown script to see if it is "indo-european"?
Really, how do you propose to do it exactly?
VViews, I did not mean to imply that you thought the MS text was just a dialect.
One of the points I meant to bring out is that looking for dialects will not really help.
The text properties of the Voynich MS are so different from those of Indo-European languages, that the method to find the solution will be the same for all of them.
I don't know if that makes my point more clear.
Finding the way from London to a particular street in Edinburgh is largely the same for all streets in Edinburgh.
Almost all words in the example you gave (mining language) were understandable, some mixture of Germanic and Romance. This is not really different from the 'usual' languages of Europe.
To extend on this, let's look at (modern) Mandarin Chinese.
This is based on syllables, and most words consist of two syllables. Some consist of one.
The most frequent syllable is pronounced 'de'. It means 'of', or creates a genetive case. It always follows another syllable, so could be said to appear at the end of a word. This is quite reminiscent of Voynichese dy which also appears at the end of words. Note that another very frequent syllable is equally pronounced 'de', and equally appears after other syllables, e.g. to create adverbs.
The second most frequent one is 'yi' which can be pronounced (english) 'ee' or 'yee'. This means 'one', or also the indefinitely article 'a'. This always appears at the start. This is of course reminiscent of Voynichese o- or qo- (ee or yee).
The next one is 'shi' with a falling tone, which is the verb 'to be'. Sounds like English 'sure' (kind of). shi with a rising tone is also frequent, and both can mean a variety of things. These could be Voynichese chol or chor .
It is surely a coincidence that l and r are the medieval symbols for 4 and 2, which are nowadays used in pinyin to indicate falling and rising tones.
Here, we see a language that behaves completely differently from (Indo-)European languages, but in many ways similar to Voyniches.
So are we back to Jacques Guy's Mandarin hypothesis?
I wonder where Jacques Guy is by the way: he was one of my favorite out of the contributors to the list, waaay back when I used to subscribe and just lurk around. Haven't read anything from him in years... has he given up on the Voynich?
(27-05-2016, 05:26 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So are we back to Jacques Guy's Mandarin hypothesis?
I wonder where Jacques Guy is by the way: he was one of my favorite out of the contributors to the list, waaay back when I used to subscribe and just lurk around. Haven't read anything from him in years... has he given up on the Voynich?
Stating that something behaves in a certain way is not the same as having a Mandarin hypothesis.
René gave good examples, but like many examples, there are other languages that behave this way besides Mandarin and Mandarin happens to be convenient for explaining it. All languages start with a certain basic "rule set" upon which the rest is built, or there would be no common ground; it would all be memorization and too difficult for people to learn. Look how people struggle to learn gender-based languages (a boatload of memorization and the main reason Esperanto was not widely adopted). Now imagine if the basic building blocks were equally arbitrary.
The structure of the VMS is similar to old languages and eastern languages moreso than contemporary languages but... that doesn't necessarily mean it's natural language. Natural languages in their "purest" form and constructed languages have much in common.
VViews - I mean exactly what Rene says. Right now, in whatever approach one wishes to follow, the distinction between various dialects and even more distant members of the same family will be rarely relevant.
While I think the idea of a "rare" or rarely attested language is a very valid one, I'm not sure how this hypothesis will help us. We could say: the language might be this or that form of French, but what would we do then?
There is one possible line of investigation this path could lead to, which is what I said before: one might look for other manuscripts in rarely attested languages and see if they have anything at all in common with the VM - be it in subject or style - and take it from there.
Or do I understand this the wrong way?