Cheshire's proposal seems to me to be out of synch with historical developments. His title is "Linguistic missing links..."
Even though examples are sparse, the history and evolution of Old Italic has been studied going back almost 3,000 years, with references to similar scripts such as Old Etruscan and Picene. Similarly, the history of Latin (not just the script, but also the linguistic development) has been reasonably well documented for quite some time.
If I understand his proposal correctly, the time frame of what Cheshire is claiming would have to be much earlier than the creation of the VMS.
Cheshire explicitly states in the abstract that his paper "provides the solution..." to the Voynich manuscript text. It is not presented as a theory.
I was wondering how other people felt about his assertion that a "proto-Romance language and proto-Italic symbols for its writing system" could exist at the time the VMS was created. Romance languages and the alphabets by which they were expressed were already well developed by the 15th century.
I'm aware that he refers to a "diluted, corrupted and simplified version" of Vulgar Latin, but it seems to me that medieval-period corrupted Vulgar Latin is something quite different from a "proto-Romance language and proto-Italic symbols".
Even though examples are sparse, the history and evolution of Old Italic has been studied going back almost 3,000 years, with references to similar scripts such as Old Etruscan and Picene. Similarly, the history of Latin (not just the script, but also the linguistic development) has been reasonably well documented for quite some time.
If I understand his proposal correctly, the time frame of what Cheshire is claiming would have to be much earlier than the creation of the VMS.
Cheshire explicitly states in the abstract that his paper "provides the solution..." to the Voynich manuscript text. It is not presented as a theory.
I was wondering how other people felt about his assertion that a "proto-Romance language and proto-Italic symbols for its writing system" could exist at the time the VMS was created. Romance languages and the alphabets by which they were expressed were already well developed by the 15th century.
I'm aware that he refers to a "diluted, corrupted and simplified version" of Vulgar Latin, but it seems to me that medieval-period corrupted Vulgar Latin is something quite different from a "proto-Romance language and proto-Italic symbols".