Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript

[-JKP-]

JKP:

Thank you - I do understand the difference between a script and a language.  I’d be most interested to see a fifteenth century instance of Turkish written left to right in Latin characters?

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These kinds of texts were especially popular in the 16th century because the invention of the printing press made it easier to create and disseminate mass-market books, but interest in this kind of thing started earlier.



You can also see charts of the old Turkic alphabet (which was used in the early medieval period) on Wikipedia:

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Note that many of the old alphabets that are somewhat Runic in nature were sometimes written in both directions. The old Turkic alphabet was usually written right to left. When Latin characters were used to express a language, they were usually written left to right. Old Turkic Yenisei inscriptions are sometimes written left to right. Some of the old Turkic inscriptions are in vertical lines (like Chinese).


It was pretty common during medieval times for languages to be written in more than one script. There was a lot more space in the middle ages, people were more nomadic then than now, and tribal and national borders changed all the time. Also, there were no public schools in the sense that we have them now, so people (tribes, kingdoms) made their own choices rather than being given a broader institutionalized choice.