10-05-2020, 12:09 AM
Thanks Koen. This is one of the two scenarios that I had in mind (the other being trade/diplomacy contact). See the Codex Cumanicus for something like the latter.
There are a huge number of examples where Christian missionaries either inventing new scripts for languages or encouraging literacy in existing scripts. English itself is one example: runes were only sporadically used for writing before the introduction of Christianity around 600.
It would explain a number of things about the Voynich text, such as the outward similarity of some glyphs to those used to write Latin and the general left to right/top to bottom order. I've also considered that one of the scribes might not have been a native speaker. This is speculation, but it's worth noting that the earliest text in Finnish is by a non-native.
The thing I find most fascinating is that the script shows some signs of deliberate design. I've tried to find out what kind of linguistic knowledge a priest or clerk would have had at the time but it's not been possible. The Greeks certainly knew enough about speech sounds to design a rational system for a script. How much a medieval priest would have known about Greek linguistics is another matter.
There are a huge number of examples where Christian missionaries either inventing new scripts for languages or encouraging literacy in existing scripts. English itself is one example: runes were only sporadically used for writing before the introduction of Christianity around 600.
It would explain a number of things about the Voynich text, such as the outward similarity of some glyphs to those used to write Latin and the general left to right/top to bottom order. I've also considered that one of the scribes might not have been a native speaker. This is speculation, but it's worth noting that the earliest text in Finnish is by a non-native.
The thing I find most fascinating is that the script shows some signs of deliberate design. I've tried to find out what kind of linguistic knowledge a priest or clerk would have had at the time but it's not been possible. The Greeks certainly knew enough about speech sounds to design a rational system for a script. How much a medieval priest would have known about Greek linguistics is another matter.