previous Basque theories of the Voynich ms?

[RenegadeHealer]

Wow Geoffrey — your post feels like someone reached into my head and wrote out a whole series of thoughts and perceptions I had about a year ago. It's uncanny to encounter someone who's been down the exact same little rabbit hole I have. Gavin Güldenpfennig here at the Ninja was the one who first inspired me to look into the Basque language as a possibility for the VMs. From there, it was You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that made me wonder if there might be a match between Voynichese's rigid glyph positioning, and proto-Basque's rigid phoneme positioning. At one point I even made a chart based on Stolfi's core-mantle-crust paradigm, where I tried to assign a Voynichese glyph (in each word position) to each possible proto-Basque consonant (in each word position). I remember entertaining the possibility that EVA=[daiin] was the Basque word jaun (meaning "sir").

I then looked at the earliest Basque language texts by Bernard Etxepare (XVI century), and tried to match the high-frequency words with my chart's supposed Voynichese equivalent. Alas, common medieval Basque words did not seem to transform easily into common valid Voynichese words in the VMs. And that's where I abandoned the project.

I'll fully admit I went at this project wholly unscientifically, which is why I never shared it with the VMs community. I started with the result I hoped for, and then tried to make the data fit the result, which I'm well aware is circular logic / begging the question. For better or for worse, I've never been successfully socialized to be disgusted by this sort of "taking a stab at it". I think there's nothing wrong with inquiring based on nothing but a hunch, as long as: A) I never forget it's merely a hunch, B) I know when to quit when my hunch isn't panning out, and C) I don't try to draw any factual conclusions from this preliminary inquiry. It was recreation for me, and it was a pilot program, to see if a more scientific study of Basque-Vonichese correspondences was warranted. (I failed to support the idea that it was.) Some may say that I wasted time and effort that could have been better spent. I see it a little differently: I had an adventure and learned some new things, even if I never found the buried treasure. I certainly have no regrets learning more about the Basque language, even if it didn't necessarily get us any closer to solving the VMs.

I'll upload the chart I made, if it would be helpful to you, Geoffrey.