[split] Bax' label readings and "labelese"

[MarcoP]

Thank you for your kind words, VViews! I am glad we made things clear

I don't have the competence to meaningfully discuss any linguistic theory, but, having read Stephen's work several times, here are a couple of points that seem to be relevant for this discussion.

1)

I find it awfully "convenient" that Voynich text should be a simple substitution cipher only when it fits assumptions based on the illustrations...

Stephen Bax did not write that the VMS is a simple substitution cipher. He doesn't think the manuscript is written in a cipher. He wrote that the Voynichese alphabet was possibly created for “a previously unwritten language or dialect, perhaps by a small community which later died out or disappeared.”

Here is a longer quote from his 2014 paper You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

A question still unresolved is why the writers of the VM used this script at all instead of another which might have been available to them (such as Latin or Arabic), and then how this particular script was devised. A common reason for devising a new script, if it is not for purely economic reasons, is to support a new national and/or religious identity or to support new cultural elements in a society, as in the case of Armenian for example (Parsumean-Tatoyean 2011). With regard to how scripts are devised, although it is possible to invent a script completely from new, this is rare; ‘new’ scripts have usually been derived or adapted from existing scripts, for example Ethiopian Ge’ez from South Arabian, with vowelling added probably following inspiration from India (Daniels 1997). Another fascinating example is that of the Glagolitic Slavic alphabet created in the 9th century. In this case a script was devised for a language which had no script by a small group of people, supposedly two brothers, using signs adapted from Greek, Hebrew, Coptic, Armenian and Samaritan (Sussex, Cubberley 2006, Auty 1968).

He also notes that “we need to be aware that, as with Linear B and Egyptian hieroglyphs, there might not be a full and straightforward one-to-one correspondence between sounds and symbols, and also that we could be dealing with a language which omits some vowels as an Abjad does, or has syllabic elements”.


2) He does not propose a strong link between Voynichese and Latin in general, nor, in particular, between EVA:doary and the Latin “Taurus”.

Historically the word Taurus is thought to derive from Proto-Indo-European *tau-ro, *tawros, *teh₂wros. meaning bull (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.); it is also linked with Semitic variants such as the Arabic word ‘thaur’, which signifies both ‘bull’ and also the constellation (Footnote: In addition, the Arabic for the Pleiades is “Al Thurayya”, though this is etymologically unrelated to ‘thaur’). For this reason, when we come to gloss the VM word positioned to the right of the seven stars in the illustration, it is important not to assume that it represents the Latin TAURUS per se, as some commentators seem to do; it could well be a variant from another language.

And below (bold mine):

In summary, the language of the Voynich manuscript is probably not European, but is more likely to be Near Eastern, Caucasian or Asian. We need further evidence to see whether it is of Indo-European, Semitic, Turkic, Kartvelian (e.g. related to Georgian) or from another language family.