Successful translation ?

[Emma May Smith]

Recently I've been playing with my own "four step solution" as an experiment. I tried to identify a language, assign values to glyphs, find matching words in the target language, and create some kind of meaning out of the word soup. The truth is that it hasn't been easy.

I thought the target language was a good choice: geographically viable, historically unwritten, small phoneme inventory, simple syllable structure. I read about the language's phonotactics, its historical phonemes, the frequency of different sounds, and about related languages and dialects (to give myself some leeway). I would have been happy to assign any value to any glyph so long as it worked. But nothing seems to work as well as it should. I have barely been able to look at the meaning of individual words and never once got to the point of questioning whether sentences were grammatical.

I'm still going to play with it for a while longer as I feel that I'm learning a lot. The main lesson is that the kind of abuse you need to do to a language to have it fit the Voynich text is quite severe. I'm really unwilling to mangle a language that much even for fun.

If I find a solution which is acceptably pleasing I will share it, along with the identity of the target language (which I actually think is very good).