previous Basque theories of the Voynich ms?

[geoffreycaveney]

Don't do it man. Our problem right now is not "which language", it is "how is whichever language it is transformed into Voynichese". Counterintuitively, the latter needs to be answered first. But this needs more than simple substitution...

I don't see how we can go about an investigation of hypotheses about the latter question, without checking and testing them with actual languages, for which we need some candidate language or languages to test.

The biggest macro-scale issue about the Voynich ms for me is the question of actual natural language, in whatever form, vs. the recent arguments by the likes of Gordon Rugg and Andreas Schinner, et al., published in Cryptologia. They argue that the properties of the Voynich ms text are consistent with meaningless text produced by a stochastic method that could have been performed by a late medieval author. I don't like the use of the word "hoax" to describe this theory, since I associate that more with the idea of a more recently created forgery. (Who exactly was the author trying to fool with his hoax in the 15th century? Surely not the people into whose hands the ms fell centuries later.) But their arguments about the properties of meaningless text seem serious and need to be addressed. It may be a depressing hypothesis to consider, but as long as you are emphasizing the big picture view of analysis of the ms text, their theory needs to be kept squarely in mind.