A new Theory about Voynich MS

[-JKP-]

RenegadeHealer wrote: No, I'm not going to get either the Basques or the Ainu involved in this. I haven't gone that far off the deep end!

Haha, I have considered the Basques as a possible source of the VMS for a number of reasons:

• They held on to their Pagan culture much longer than most places, despite the attempts of their oppressors to Catholicize them, and thus might embue a manuscript with a generous dose of water and naked nymphs.
  
• They resisted cultural absorption by their larger neighbors.
  
• They have an old and unique language that bears little resemblance to that of its neighbors and appears to predate the split into Caucasus languages and to have gone in its own direction.
  
• They used a numeric system common to the trades, which is vaguely runic in appearance and also resembles Greek acrophonic numerals, in the sense that it uses stacking in a logical way to denote quantity (in other words, the idea of "benching" a glyph was part of their consciousness).
  
• They were close enough to major powers to have been influenced by literacy, yet far enough up in the mountains to keep many of their own traditions, which might result in something sort of recognizable but also sort of odd like the Voynich Manuscript.
  
• Basque whalers were astonishing seafarers. They made regular trips to Iceland to go after whales in the northmost waters and visited it so often they learned a kind of pidgin Icelandic. Their ancient oral history includes tales about lands west of Iceland, possibly the New World.
  

IMO there are a lot of reasons to consider the Basques.