previous Basque theories of the Voynich ms?

[Emma May Smith]

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.

Geoffrey, your example of Linear B is apt. The evidence from pictograms, people, and numbers was all internal to the documents they were studying. Advances such as the Kober triplets were based on observations of patterns in the text and not from outside information. Guesses about how the script worked were based on general principles rather than drawing from specific scripts. Ventris's guesses of town names was the last step before the script unraveled (into a language he didn't expect!). So much work by Kober, Ventris, and others, went into getting to that last stage.

The Voynich manuscript contains vast numbers of patterns we should draw on to give us a solid understanding of the text, the script, and the potential underlying language before we make guesses. I'm happy for people to use hypothetical languages to explore ideas (I do this too), but presenting them as a fully-formed theory is deleterious. It erodes trust among researchers because it promotes the idea that research on the Voynich is nothing more than flying kites and watching others shoot them down. I have read dozens of theories like yours from which i have learnt nothing. Not one thing. I beg you - really truly beg you - please take research on the Voynich seriously.