(17-08-2025, 01:48 PM)Koen G wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This consideration is not complete without taking into account pseudo-scripts. People had a general idea of what (a particular style of) Arabic and Hebrew looked like, and somewhat convincingly imitated these.
Pseudo-scripts are interesting and quite possibly relevant, but they are part of a diffierent question.
I very much doubt that anyone looking at the MS in the first two centuries or so would have thought: this looks like one of these scripts that appear in some paintings.
In fact, people looking at paintings with pseudo-scripts could have had the same doubt: is this a strange language?
The other question is not: "what were people seeing the MS thinking", but: "what was the creator doing". Basically the core of the Voynich mystery.
If he was using a cipher, then there should be a meaningful text behind it.
But it did not really look like a cipher to later users (who did not know all the languages in the world).
So what is the alternative? We can be reasonably confident that it is not a lost language.
It could be an invented language by the author (of which the meaning is lost), a constructed language (a la Friedman), an imaginary/fake language (as in pseudo-scripts).
This goes beyond the purpose of this thread though.