[Article] Proposed solution by Gerard Chesire

[MarcoP]

Seems to be the same good old Latin substitution, eh?

Here's a challenge.

Those who are proficient in medieval vulgar Latin can take the following passage (taken from p.20):

"Molor orqueina doleina dolinar æor domar om nar nar or æina, dolina ræina domor nor æina æina na nas omina eimina rolasa, nais oe eina domina domeina etna domar doma dolar dolina ro."

and see what they think this might mean.

After that, they are welcome to compare their own interpretation with that of the author (p.21).

It's strange how this kind of thing seems to becoming more and more popular. I guess people are fascinated with Latin and the VMS but don't feel like really studying them.
This work is so carefully presented, that the same effort could have been used to make progress in one of the more serious linguistic approaches:

• That of Stephen Bax, working on labels and images and trying to correlate visual and linguistic data. Chesire doesn't try to systematically analyse labels. He does pick a couple of examples from different pages and interprets them with his "Vulgar Latin" i.e. an arbitrary mixture of largely unrelated languages like Croatian, Polish and Portuguese.
  
  
• That of Emma May Smith, collecting and analysing statistics from the main body of the text. Again, Chesire is happy to interpret EVA:p as Latin 'p', without commenting on the fact that this character almost exclusively appears in the first line of paragraphs. Where are the Ps in the other lines? Even more amazingly, he thinks that EVA:q is Latin 'd', totally ignoring that EVA:q almost exclusively appears before a single character (EVA:o) and only at the beginning of words. Words with non-initial d followed by different vowels (like quando, vidi, legenda, gradum) cannot exist. I attach the histograms of character position in words (word start left, word end right) for Latin 'd' and Voynich EVA:q.
  

"Molor orqueina doleina dolinar æor domar om nar nar or æina, dolina ræina domor nor æina æina na nas omina eimina rolasa, nais oe eina domina domeina etna domar doma dolar dolina ro."