01-06-2018, 08:30 PM
Here's the thing: it doesn't really matter whether the Voynich script was invented completely new or adapted from an existing script. Plenty of people with the appropriate knowledge have looked at the script and nobody has identified it. That means it cannot be read using outside knowledge. We can only read it using the text itself as a guide. That's the lesson we take away from this fact, and everything else is speculation.
Nor does it really matter whether a culture of writing in this script once existed or not. We don't have any other texts written in this script so we must consider it unique. We can guess that the scribe had some practice writing the forms of the glyphs, but that can witness only individual use. Contrarily, we can see that the text subtly changes over time (Currier A and B), so we might guess that writing conventions were not settled. None of this means that other texts did or did not once exist, only that they don't now. Without being able to settle the question either way there's not much we can learn from it.
The question that people are trying to address is whether any of this means that the underlying language is likely to be common or exotic. The problem is that the circumstances of the script can't answer that question. We can construct various scenarios to explain why an unidentified script exists and why the text is unique. But the script itself is the fact needing to be explained here and not the thing doing the explaining. Evidence needs to come from elsewhere.
On a related note, as we're discussing the origin of a unique and unidentified script, I'll share an old theory (which I may have already spoken about). I've always tried to keep alive in my mind at least two different potential solutions at any one time. The goal being to acknowledge that both can explain some of the facts though one of them must be wrong. It's like a foil: unless one theories is miles better than the other, it's likely that I haven't yet solved it.
Anyway, one of these theories used to be that the underlying language was Maltese. This worked quite well. It was different in structure from most European languages so could have fitted the text more realistically. Yet it was embedded in European culture so that the imagery and structure of the manuscript needed little explaining. The manuscript looked like a product from, say, northern Italy simply because the author was in direct contact with that culture.
The theory behind the script was also wonderfully plausible. Maltese was an unwritten language in 1400, though it is likely people were experimenting with literacy at the time as the first written record is from 1436. It may have been that the Maltese elite, literate in Italian and Latin, knew that the Maltese language was different and doubted that it could be written in the Roman script. Thus somebody invented the script we see today, which incorporated specific features unique to the needs of Maltese, but with a vague influence from the Roman script the inventor already knew.
Maybe the script never really worked any better than attempts to write Maltese with the Roman script so the experiment was abandoned. Maybe the inventor believed in it and worked on longer examples to convince others. Maybe it was thought safer not to write religious texts cryptically.
It's all speculation. It's easy to come up with this kind of theory which is plausible but unprovable. Ultimately it doesn't add to our knowledge.
Nor does it really matter whether a culture of writing in this script once existed or not. We don't have any other texts written in this script so we must consider it unique. We can guess that the scribe had some practice writing the forms of the glyphs, but that can witness only individual use. Contrarily, we can see that the text subtly changes over time (Currier A and B), so we might guess that writing conventions were not settled. None of this means that other texts did or did not once exist, only that they don't now. Without being able to settle the question either way there's not much we can learn from it.
The question that people are trying to address is whether any of this means that the underlying language is likely to be common or exotic. The problem is that the circumstances of the script can't answer that question. We can construct various scenarios to explain why an unidentified script exists and why the text is unique. But the script itself is the fact needing to be explained here and not the thing doing the explaining. Evidence needs to come from elsewhere.
On a related note, as we're discussing the origin of a unique and unidentified script, I'll share an old theory (which I may have already spoken about). I've always tried to keep alive in my mind at least two different potential solutions at any one time. The goal being to acknowledge that both can explain some of the facts though one of them must be wrong. It's like a foil: unless one theories is miles better than the other, it's likely that I haven't yet solved it.
Anyway, one of these theories used to be that the underlying language was Maltese. This worked quite well. It was different in structure from most European languages so could have fitted the text more realistically. Yet it was embedded in European culture so that the imagery and structure of the manuscript needed little explaining. The manuscript looked like a product from, say, northern Italy simply because the author was in direct contact with that culture.
The theory behind the script was also wonderfully plausible. Maltese was an unwritten language in 1400, though it is likely people were experimenting with literacy at the time as the first written record is from 1436. It may have been that the Maltese elite, literate in Italian and Latin, knew that the Maltese language was different and doubted that it could be written in the Roman script. Thus somebody invented the script we see today, which incorporated specific features unique to the needs of Maltese, but with a vague influence from the Roman script the inventor already knew.
Maybe the script never really worked any better than attempts to write Maltese with the Roman script so the experiment was abandoned. Maybe the inventor believed in it and worked on longer examples to convince others. Maybe it was thought safer not to write religious texts cryptically.
It's all speculation. It's easy to come up with this kind of theory which is plausible but unprovable. Ultimately it doesn't add to our knowledge.