Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript

[Ahmet Ardıç]

I am wondering why a 15th-century manuscript would be written in Old Turkish. Would it not be more likely to be written in Anatolian Turkish?

Hi,

One of these idioms refers to the dialect in a certain geographical region and the other refers to the time period. The term "Anatolian Turkish" (Turkey Turkish) is chosen to describe dialectal differences about geographic regions. The term "Old Turkish" covers the 15th century too. 

For now, we do not know what dialect/subdialect of Turkic language the author used. It is hard to define the dialect/subdialect of the author, for this dialect may be no longer in use. Or, may be the author used mixed dialect. The author's used of words were meet with todays Turkey Turkish, Gagauz-Turkish, Uzbek Turkish and Azetbaijani Turkish mostly. For this reason, we do not know exactly which dialect she/he used. When I made a presentation at Istinye University in Istanbul, we discussed this VMS dialect issue with linguists there. Everyone have indicates some different opinion on this matter. This issue will probably be discussed for a long time. 

In Anatolian Turkish the basic sentence form is (mostly) “SOV”: (Subject, Object, Verb) but sometimes in a poetic writing structure may alter this structure. In addition, it is possible to say that the order of “SOV” may change in some Turkish-language dialects. For example, "VOS" (Verb, Object, Subject) order can be seen in Gagauz-Turkish language. 

A substantial amount of the words used in the Voynich Manuscript are in current use by many modern Azerbaijani-Turkish and Anatolian-Turkish dialects, and many of the words (aprox. 21%) have not changed at all, for the phonetic pronunciations and contextual definitions have remained intact. 

Furthermore, the text that appeared in VM is following many Turkish phonetic and morphological structures. Although, there are too many such concepts to list here a few examples we can provide include facts such as, both VM and Turkish structure does not have any words that end with “/b/, /c/, /d/, /g/”. Likewise, they also do not have any words that start with “/f/, /h/, /j/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /p/, /r/, /v/, /z/, /ş/”. There are some exception to this rule. 

There might be word being taken from other languages such as Arabic, Persian, etc. Additionally, we must account for the fact that certain first letters may be dropped , as well as letters can be changed to replace others as dialects expanded and evolved. For example, the word “bar” became “var”; “/b/” can also become “/m/”, “/s/| becomes “ş” etc.. Another example that has no exceptions is the use of the letter “/ğ/”, as there are no word that start with it. All of this is reflected in the VM.

We have no doubt that the Voynich Manuscript is in Turkish, this is a clearly known issue for us. But there are different ideas about the author's dialect or sub-dialect. 

I am very confident in saying that "in the future, no linguist will be able to prove that VMS writing is not Turkish if her/his professional knowledge of Turkish language is not weak" for sure. There are very clear Turkish sentences read in VMS and no linguist can deny them. 
[<You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.>]
One of the problems is that we cannot find some words in Turkish dictionaries.
For example, if we do not recognize 1 word in a sentence, we cannot translate it. 
Of course, there are also sentences we know all the words. So, it is the area that why I can say "I am very confident"...

However, I think that some words used by the author in Turkish sentences may be 600 years old Italian or Greek words. For this reason, it is useful to work with multilingual groups. Because the author of VMS probably was a multilingual person in her/his natural daily life.

In addition, the author was carefully designed the articles of every single page in VMS (by writing a sketch or scribble page) before she/he started writing on main pages. In my opinion, She/he has been written that texts on another paper as a sketch first for every time for every single main page in VMS. When she/he was sure that she/he didn't make any mistake in sketch pages, she/he was writing the VMS main page articles herself/himself and possibly an additional one or 2 other people (if the author was busy). In my opinion, this manuscript was created by "one leading brain", but it was probably written by total of 3 people (included the author). 

Best regards,

Ahmet Ardıç
ATA Team Alberta