A random language upon which to experiment

[Koen G]

A language family which often shows up in experienced researchers' (including Emma) lists of possibilities is Turkic languages. These cover large parts of Asia nowadays (see map) but have also been relatively close to Europe historically. 



If the VM actually contains a fairly plainly written natural language, it is not unlikely to be a Turkic language in some form. 

I don't necessarily blame people of Eurocentricism. It's just a lot easier to test with languages one is somewhat familiar with. Latin, given its relative stability and omnipresence in medieval Europe's written culture is the prime example of a language which is both historically likely and accessible to us.

Problem is, time and time again it turns out that it's impossible to turn Voynichese into Latin by any viable method.

So yes, we must look somewhere else. But it's not sufficient to take for example a 15th century Mandarin text and see if it maps to Voynichese (it obviously doesn't). The VM script as a whole is unattested, which means that - if it was used to put a language to paper - someone used a non standard way of turning that language's sounds into script. 

All this means that it's excessively hard for us, most of us who were raised in an Indo-European language, to decently test non-Indo-European theories.

Just to give you an idea. A while ago we were talking on the forum about whether it would be possible to locate a word for "and" in Voynichese. I went to google translate and it gives me these possible translations for "and" in Chinese:

和, 与, 而, 及, 而且, 并

Errr... Clearly Voynichese does not use a writing system like Chinese, which means that if it is such a language, it must be written phonetically (with the possibility of all or some vowels being left out, imperfect transcription and so on). So in order to test this properly, this means figuring out the pronunciation of the Chinese words for and in the 15th century. Or at least have a fair idea of what they are. And then check the same for dozens of other dialects

Just to say, it's really difficult without the proper linguistic knowledge.