Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript

[Hubert Dale]

Voynichese might be a transcription attempt for people who were used to reading left to right. Such a scenario is not unlikely if we're talking material that crossed the area between east and west a few times.

That reminds me something.

What if, we write Arabic texts using transliterations, one-to-one mapping, will a native speaker be able to read it?

For example, I copied this from Wikipedia:

‏"لغة القرآن" بما أن القرآن نزل باللغة العربية، فقد أُطلق اسم اللغة عليه

And transliterate it one-by-one, and write left-to-right:

"lGƕ alqrãn" bma än alqrãn nzl ballGƕ alʕrbyƕ, fqd äᵘTlq asm allGƕ ʕlyh

(The mapping system is quite arbitrary, because I do not understand Arabic. But I think people who understand it would be able to see the basic rules behind the mapping system)

Will a native speaker, or an Arabic learner, be able to read it if they know the mapping / transliteration system?

Hello ChenZhe,

Yes - your Arabic transcription is perfectly legible and intelligible.

Not only that but, because your transcription uses a unique character for each Arabic letter, it’s possible to convert it back to the correct Arabic form without necessarily needing to know a word of Arabic.

But a non-Arabic speaker would not know the correct pronunciation of some words because, as I’m sure you know, Arabic doesn’t indicate short vowels. The first word of your example is pronounced ‘lugha,’ but you have to know to insert the ‘u’ between the ‘l’ and the ‘gh’. It’s not indicated in the script.

There are different ways of transcribing Arabic in Latin characters, and all have their atrengths and weaknesses. Basically, the more you make the transcription easy for a non-Arabic speaker to pronounce, the further that transcription diverges from a one-to-one system such as yours. Hence ‘lugha’ has five letters while the Arabic word, and your transcription of it, both have three..