[Article] Pardis Motiee, "First Page of Voynich Manuscript: The Unheard Story" (LingBuzz)

[Pardis Motiee]

Hi Pardis, welcome to the forum.

I've typed out the EVA to Romanized Farsi equivalences you utilize, to the best of what I can gather:

• a = a
  
• ch = a
  
• d = s
  
• e = t
  
• f = g
  
• i = i, y
  
• in = m
  
• k = r
  
• l = t
  
• m = t
  
• o = d
  
• p = p
  
• q = k
  
• r = r
  
• s = h
  
• sh = j
  
• t = p
  
• y = b, o, u, v
  

I agree with the statement in your paper that these equivalencies need work. Specifically, I am skeptical as to why the writer would use two ways each to write /a/, /p/, and /r/, three ways to write /t/, and no way to write /n/, /l/, or /z/.

One thing I appreciate about your approach, is that it potentially accounts for the linguistically odd patterns of reduplication and quasi-reduplication, and the odd rigid pattern of glyph placement within words. No good explanation for these two features of Voynichese is what damns most attempts at decoding. From what I gather from your work, the repetitiveness is a product of the encoding process involving a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or argot, similar to Verlan in French. It's an interesting idea; language games for the purpose of speaking in code are a worldwide phenomenon and not a new concept. You could strengthen your case a lot by finding historical documentation of a language game used by medieval Farsi speakers that fits the repetition, intercalation, and phoneme-swapping patterns you describe. The problem with this is that language games have always been primarily applied to oral, not written, language. And as such, many if not most language games have gone mostly undocumented in written literature, until the advent of modern linguistics.

Hi and thank you. Yes, like زرگری language. It is not odd to me; again in Farsi script we have 2 letters for t (if we count short and capital letters it would be 3), 3 s ,and 4 z : sound is same but the shapes are different. It also could be a way for Voynich writers to increase decoding difficulties. L exists but I'm not sure of N.