previous Basque theories of the Voynich ms?

[geoffreycaveney]

May I ask what other types of evidence within the ms itself that you would look for to generate a hypothesis about the possible language in which the text is written?

I would like you to demonstrate:

• Why a particular glyph should be identified as a vowel.
  
• Why a particular glyph should be a plosive/fricative/liquid/nasal/semivowel.
  
• Why particular words or affixes should be considered specific parts of the grammar.
  

The idea is that even without a candidate language, you should be able to demonstrate the principles of the underlying language. Starting from internal evidence only I want you to argue how you got to the idea that [r] = /r/ or [l] = /l/. Can you demonstrate that they fit into a class like liquids? That clusters such as [lk] = /lt/ make sense? That [chedy] = /hik/ "you (erg)" makes sense? What is "you" doing in the text? What verbs does it relate to?

I don't accept the idea that the linguistic properties of a text in a completely unknown writing system and unknown language can necessarily be analyzed in the manner and especially in such depth as you suggest, without any accompanying hypothesis at all about a candidate language, at least for the purpose of checking and testing one's hypotheses about these linguistic properties. The Linear B researchers had a lot of additional information to guide them when they developed hypotheses about such linguistic properties -- drawings of items and people and numbers that accompanied the text. They didn't analyze the text in a vacuum isolated from its context, and fortunately in the case of Linear B the context was practical, not fanciful. We enjoy no such advantages with the Voynich ms. We have the Pleiades, a Zodiac chart, and beyond that we are mostly guessing.

Is there any example in history of taking a text with no outside context whatsoever, and successfully analyzing its phonological or grammatical properties in the way that you suggest? I am sincerely asking this question, I would be very interested to know if it has ever been successfully done before with another text.

I actually do have some ideas and analysis that may at least partially answer some of your questions. In some cases these ideas and analysis may hold up outside the context of any particular language under consideration. But first I want to make my main point above, to question the extent to which phonological and grammatical properties of a text can be successfully analyzed without any surrounding context to guide us and without a hypothesis about possible candidate languages. Even when for example analysts say that "the properties of the text do not appear to correspond with the structure of any Indo-European language", they are implicitly considering an Indo-European language as their possible candidate language, and then rejecting that connection.