The Constructed Language Hypothesis

[MarcoP]

Since a few years, I am very fond of the constructed language idea, but I must say that this preference is more irrational attraction than well-grounded reasoning. I spent some time studying Dee and Kelley's Enochian, but it certainly deserves more attention. I think it's worth remembering that both Ildegard's Lingua Ignota and Enochian came with their own custom alphabets (though I think the corpus of Enochian was written with the Latin alphabet and we don't really have a corpus of Lingua Ignota). I know absolutely nothing of the later artificial languages mentioned by Patrick.

...my favourite 'key question'  about the Voynich MS may provide some insight.
That is: in case we could answer this key question.

This is:
Is it possible to do a word-by-word substitution of the Voynich MS and come up with a meaningful text?

I see more reasons why the answer should be "no"  rather than "yes".

If it is "no", then we cannot create a dictionary of Voynichese to some known language.
A constructed language is most easily conceived in the form of a dictionary.

If it is "no", then also all types of ciphers are excluded, even the more complicated diplomatic ones.

Essentially all past proposed meaningful solutions assume that some form of dictionary should exist.

I think this is a great line of investigation, though I prefer to look at the question as the search for grammar, rather than meaning. Grammar has the advantage of being less subjective and easier to express formally.

The idea that there is a one-to-one word-by-word substitution that could result in grammatical text is not easy to defend. Two obvious problems are line effects and the different "dialects".

As we You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. several times, natural languages have a limited set of "function words" which typically include the top ten most frequent words. These words are very frequent in all texts written in any specific language.
But You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are different: there are no words that we can expect to encode e.g. "and" or "of" in both HerbalA and Quire13. Similarly, there are line effects: why should some words have a preference to occur at the start of a line?
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., this suggests some kind of transformation:

In the Voynich text, words which might have an ‘ideal’ spelling in isolation are altered in relation to their neighbouring words and their place in a line. This results in a word having multiple different spellings, but which are regular and predictable in a known environment.

My examples, just to illustrate how I understand the process: the word that occurs as Shedy "inside" a line can be transformed into yShedy at the start of a line; or p-words in the first line of a paragraph (e.g. opchedy) correspond to t-words in the other lines (otchedy).

These supposed transformations are of course a huge problem and imply that there is no one-to-one word-to-word mapping. There could be a one-to-many mapping (where each plain-text word appears as different Voynich words on the basis of paragraph position, line position, dialect). Focussing on grammar has the advantage that one can search for structure, independently from any assumption about the underlying natural or artificial language. This would be similar to doing at word level what Stolfi did at character level. I made some attempts at finding rules describing how Voynich words follow each other, but I couldn't find anything solid.

The only grammatical features that can be easily detected do not appear to be language-like: line effects, consecutive repetition of the same word, similar words appearing next to each other. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. proposed a cipher system (mod2) that results in the last feature, but of course the frequency of the consecutive repetition of identical words is a big stumbling block for word-to-word mapping with a natural language.