The Impossibility of Double Gallows

[-JKP-]

Isn't it possible that someone was copying some centuries old manuscript to a new set of vellum (which was carbon dated to 1404-1438 period) and the underlying language was a lot more primitive than we thought   Rather than Voynichese being something derived from Medieval latin conventions, couldn't it be something that contributed to (preceded) the development of the Latin scribal conventions as you all know it? Just an idea..

Common_Man, how far back were you thinking?

The Greeks of pre-Roman and transitional Greco-Roman times left behind some pretty sophisticated writing that was still respected and copied in the Middle Ages. Latin derived many of its scribal conventions from Greek manuscripts, so these ideas were around long before the Middle Ages.

The SHAPES in the VMS are mostly derived from Latin, but if Voynichese includes abbreviations or ligatures (it looks like it might, but it hasn't been confirmed one way or the other), these conventions have been around since before the Carolingian era. The underlying language and scribal conventions of the Greek and Greco-Roman periods is not what we would call primitive.

Many of the same scribal concepts for ligatures and abbreviations in Greek manuscripts also existed in India around the same time, so these scribal concepts were not limited to the Mediterranean. I don't get the impression that languages were primitive at the time, either (I'm not a linguist, so maybe someone who is could say more about this). They may have been less blended (and less standardized) than they are now, but I don't get the idea that they were primitive.