Actual theories on Voynichese being Rhaetian?

[Sephardi_Genius]

Hello everyone, my undergraduate concentration in history was on late medieval and early modern Northern Italy, so my first thought when I learned about the suspected provenance of the Voynich manuscript to Tyrol or a similar Alpine region was that it could've been written in some form of Rhaeto-Romance language, such as Ladin, Romansch, or Friulian. I tried looking on this forum for anyone that's gone on a deep dive into this theory, but I wasn't able to find anything. I will be the first to admit that I am far from capable of engineering such a theory to begin with (even my standard Italian and classical Latin skills are pretty bad at this point), and I suspect that any Romance language is probably out of the question, but was just interested if anyone had actually gone down this rabbit hole before, and what their conclusions might've been?

[pjburkshire]

Earlier this year there was a lot of discussion by user MHTamdgidi_(Behrooz) regarding the Countess Margaret of Tyrol:

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[RadioFM]

The thing is, as RenéZ accurately pointed out, that Voynich manuscript is statistically so far removed from mainstream European language families, that it makes little sense to narrow it down to a single language yet (any Romance or Germanic dialect, that is).
It's like fantasizing about landing on Mars without even as much having a plane to fly on the stratosphere.

[pjburkshire]

The thing is, as RenéZ accurately pointed out, that Voynich manuscript is statistically so far removed from mainstream European language families, that it makes little sense to narrow it down to a single language yet (any Romance or Germanic dialect, that is).

Why do you use the word "yet"?  Are you expecting something to change?

[Sephardi_Genius]

The thing is, as RenéZ accurately pointed out, that Voynich manuscript is statistically so far removed from mainstream European language families, that it makes little sense to narrow it down to a single language yet (any Romance or Germanic dialect, that is).
It's like fantasizing about landing on Mars without even as much having a plane to fly on the stratosphere.

This is what I meant when I said "I suspect a Romance language is out of the question." The currently available analysis as well as the general level of scrutiny the VMS has been subjected to means that there's a near 0 percent chance its any Latin-derived language, no matter how obscure.

[RadioFM]

A Romance/Germanic dialect is out of the question insofar as the Voynich ms. text not being encrypted and taken at face value, or it being gibberish.

If it's encoded text however, then no, it's not out of the question. We can't rule Latin or Romance/Germanic dialects out, they are prime candidate for the plaintext language given the materiality study of the manuscript.

Alternatively, you have people arguing it could be gibberish or that it could be a copy/transcription of some other language families. These are not out of the question either, and to their credit, some of these hypotheses do have consistent evidence with them (like Stolfi's word-length distribution consistent and other statistics consistent with East Asian languages, or Torsten's self-citation gibberish, to name a couple off the top of my head).