[split] Implications of multiple scribes

[Emma May Smith]

There's a number of languages in or near Europe which were unwritten (or little written) at the time the manuscript was made. I believe these should be our main interest.

Do you have certain languages in mind ?

I used to favour a Turkic language. I thought it would make a good match and there were lots of Turkic speaking communities in the eastern part of Europe. As far west as Poland there were settled Lipka Tatars by this time. I now think that the sounds and word structure of Turkic don't match well enough with what we know.

My favourite now is a Finnic language. Very few phonemes, simple syllable structure, and a word structure which could be decomposed into multiple smaller morphemes. Finnic speaking people lived very much within reach of other populations who might have brought the culture of this manuscript to them. Yet Finnic languages themselves were mostly unwritten at this date (interestingly, a related language Permic was first written in Cyrillic shortly before this time). This suggests that the manuscript could have been an attempt to originate literacy in Finnic. This, however, is all speculation.