27-05-2016, 03:42 PM
One of my favourite anecdotes.....
When I went to "high school" (Gymnasium) I all of a sudden had to learn foreign languages like English and French (in the first year). One of the two teachers explained us that these two languages are basically similar. So we said to each other: yeah right. English and French similar? No way. Then came Latin, and German, even one year of classical Greek.
Many, many years later I started to learn Thai. It was then that I realised that this teacher was right. English and Fench are really similar, and this one was *really* different.
The point of this is, that it is not likely that the Voynich MS text is "just" a dialect of 15th C Europe, because these are not sufficiently different from the main languages. Of course, there are exceptions, usually leftovers from pre-Roman cultures such as Basque and Gaelic (languages rather than dialects of course), but there are other reasons why the Voynich MS text is not just one of them written in an invented alphabet.
In the early days of the old mailing list I "bumped into" a strange language called "Faetar". Jacquest Guy loved it. This was spoken in only one or two villages in Southern Italy, and never written down. This is one of the languages/dialects that could go on the list proposed in this thread. However, in the end this (and similar) dialects aren't *that* different from Italian.
The Voynich text is very, very different from the main European languages, so, assuming that there is a meaningful content, I see two possibilities:
1) It could be written in a very, very different language
2) It could be a common language which is rendered in a very unusual manner.
In the second case, the change is so deep (think "word pattern") that we can't distinguish the original language at all.
In that case, it could still be "just" Latin, vulgate, or some regional derivative of it. All Romance languages are sufficiently similar.
W.r.t option 1, the question remains which languages are really sufficiently different.
Greek? I don't think so. Same with Hebrew.
With the various Arabic languages I am not sure. Could be.
When it comes to Eastern Asian languages, then I would say yes.
When I went to "high school" (Gymnasium) I all of a sudden had to learn foreign languages like English and French (in the first year). One of the two teachers explained us that these two languages are basically similar. So we said to each other: yeah right. English and French similar? No way. Then came Latin, and German, even one year of classical Greek.
Many, many years later I started to learn Thai. It was then that I realised that this teacher was right. English and Fench are really similar, and this one was *really* different.
The point of this is, that it is not likely that the Voynich MS text is "just" a dialect of 15th C Europe, because these are not sufficiently different from the main languages. Of course, there are exceptions, usually leftovers from pre-Roman cultures such as Basque and Gaelic (languages rather than dialects of course), but there are other reasons why the Voynich MS text is not just one of them written in an invented alphabet.
In the early days of the old mailing list I "bumped into" a strange language called "Faetar". Jacquest Guy loved it. This was spoken in only one or two villages in Southern Italy, and never written down. This is one of the languages/dialects that could go on the list proposed in this thread. However, in the end this (and similar) dialects aren't *that* different from Italian.
The Voynich text is very, very different from the main European languages, so, assuming that there is a meaningful content, I see two possibilities:
1) It could be written in a very, very different language
2) It could be a common language which is rendered in a very unusual manner.
In the second case, the change is so deep (think "word pattern") that we can't distinguish the original language at all.
In that case, it could still be "just" Latin, vulgate, or some regional derivative of it. All Romance languages are sufficiently similar.
W.r.t option 1, the question remains which languages are really sufficiently different.
Greek? I don't think so. Same with Hebrew.
With the various Arabic languages I am not sure. Could be.
When it comes to Eastern Asian languages, then I would say yes.