The Constructed Language Hypothesis

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Here's a quick attempt at a description of the constructed language Athanasius Kircher set forth in his You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1663) -- a date which places it three years before he's thought to have been sent the Voynich Manuscript.

Kircher's goal was to create a universal written language that could easily be converted into other languages (his dictionary furnishes translations into Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, and German).  Although his system is structured much like a code, its purpose was to make writings more rather than less accessible.

His book presents two different schemes in some detail.

In the first scheme, each word begins with a Roman numeral that identifies its category:

I through XXIII: various words arranged in alphabetical order (in Latin)
XXIV: countries
XXV: cities
XXVI: time expressions
XXVII: personal names
XXVIII: adverbs
XXIX: prepositions
XXX: pronouns
XXXI: forms of "to be"
XXXII: forms of "to have"

Next comes an Arabic numeral that identifies a specific word within one of these categories.  For example:

II-1: news
II-2: to play at dice
II-3: white
II-4: to feed
II-5: friend, etc.

XXV-1: Amsterdam
XXV-2: Antwerp
XXV-3: Avignon
XXV-4: Augsburg
XXV-5: Orleans, etc.

XXX-1: from them
XXX-2: from me
XXX-3: from us
XXX-4: from you (sg)
XXX-5: from you (pl)
XXX-6: I
XXX-7: of them, etc.

XXXI-1: I am
XXXI-2: you (sg) are
XXXI-3: he [she, it] is
XXXI-4: we are
XXXI-5: you (pl) are
XXXI-6: they are
XXXI-7: I was
XXXI-8: you (sg) were, etc.

A third element is optional and is drawn from a set of symbols that featurally represent grammatical distinctions of case, number, voice, tense, and mood.

   

Kircher also provided a second scheme -- intended for letter-writing -- in which each word again begins with a Roman numeral that identifies its category but ends with a capital letter corresponding to some frequently used expression.  Many of these expressions involve seemingly trivial distinctions among options for writing "your most humble and obedient servant" and so forth, but we also have:

XXIV-A = you
XXIV-B = your
XXIV-C = your parents
XXIV-D = your relatives
XXIV-E = your brothers
XXIV-F = your sisters, etc.

Offered as one concrete example of an early (but not fifteenth-century) constructed language in which words have a very rigid structure.