[quote pid='6382' dateline='1474637604']
ThomasCoon:
Mary D'Imperio gave this chart at the end of her 1978 work:
![[Image: attachment.php?aid=650]](http://www.voynich.ninja/attachment.php?aid=650)
I've often wondered if the things that Job mentioned appear in the manuscript: maybe [in] = "um" and [iin] = "unt", so that the result is Latin. But this is only a passing idea - nothing that I have researched
[/quote]
Thomas, I haven't seen d'Imperio's chart before (I usually avoid reading old theories because I tend to get tunnel-vision when I do) but she's mostly right. Her chart needs some tweaking, as do the letter forms, and it's incomplete, but I can confirm that it's close enough to get the general idea across that many of the VMS glyphs are based on Latin abbreviations.
However, there's no firm evidence yet that the underlying language is Latin. It's possible but... the problem with most of the attempts at Latin decipherment rely on a great deal of subjective juggling of the abbreviations to give them different values to overcome the problem of entropy.
Even in the middle ages, Latin abbreviations had different values in different languages and d'Imperio's chart only describes the Latin extensions (and only a few of them). English, French, German, and Italian scribes applied their own interpretations to the same shapes. Some of them have commonalities with Latin, but some are specific to the language. Also... if the VMS is enciphered, the same shapes may have been applied in a completely different way.
ThomasCoon:
Mary D'Imperio gave this chart at the end of her 1978 work:
I've often wondered if the things that Job mentioned appear in the manuscript: maybe [in] = "um" and [iin] = "unt", so that the result is Latin. But this is only a passing idea - nothing that I have researched
[/quote]
Thomas, I haven't seen d'Imperio's chart before (I usually avoid reading old theories because I tend to get tunnel-vision when I do) but she's mostly right. Her chart needs some tweaking, as do the letter forms, and it's incomplete, but I can confirm that it's close enough to get the general idea across that many of the VMS glyphs are based on Latin abbreviations.
However, there's no firm evidence yet that the underlying language is Latin. It's possible but... the problem with most of the attempts at Latin decipherment rely on a great deal of subjective juggling of the abbreviations to give them different values to overcome the problem of entropy.
Even in the middle ages, Latin abbreviations had different values in different languages and d'Imperio's chart only describes the Latin extensions (and only a few of them). English, French, German, and Italian scribes applied their own interpretations to the same shapes. Some of them have commonalities with Latin, but some are specific to the language. Also... if the VMS is enciphered, the same shapes may have been applied in a completely different way.