Possibility for an a-priori constructed philosophical mathematical language

[qoltedy]

Lately I’ve been trying to look at the Voynich manuscript in a more objective way, not to solve it, but to understand how its text behaves. Along the way I’ve been reading about two Catalan figures from the 13th and 14th centuries, Ramon Llull (like RenegadeHealer) and Arnau de Vilanova, and I keep thinking there might be a link between their worlds.

Llull built a logical system made of letters and rotating figures that could combine ideas and represent universal truths. Arnau was very different, more of a doctor and alchemist, writing about herbs, baths, astrology and how nature affects the body. There are some books attributed to him but not confirmed, but at least there was a kind of follow up school of.his thoughts, keeping his way of thinking alive. His genuine works were usually not much illustrated (at least what I have seen in internet). That made me think: what if the Voynich were something like an “illustrated Arnau” - the same kind of medical and natural knowledge, but shown visually to transmit it more clearly, as Lisa Fagin Davis suggested in her recent talk? (Meaning sort of school papers to learn)

If someone took Arnau’s themes and expressed them through Llull’s kind of symbolic, rule-based structure, the result could look surprisingly close to the Voynich. The herbal drawings, the bathing scenes, the cosmic diagrams, and the systematic, almost algorithmic writing would all make sense in that mix.

Of course, it’s only a personal theory from an amateur, just an idea that helps me explore the manuscript with more curiosity than certainty.

I think this is quite a compelling way to look at it, and I've come to relatively similar conclusions through a different logical path.

Assuming the conlang system is relatively simple, and the perceived complexity emerges from combinations of simpler primitives, I would expect whatever those morphemes are, which combine to make new meaning, would be very universal ideas. Perhaps so universal, that there is a remarkably small number of them, encoding a remarkably small amount of fundamental concepts.

I would suspect that a mind capable of creating such an elegant but functional system would likely be what we today call a "genius". Likely someone with a scientific, mathematical intuition and very much creativity and originality, as evidenced by well, everything in the Manuscript.

Such a Medieval genius would very possibly be interdisciplinary/polymathic, and be interested in a number of scientific or technical questions. The diagrams absolutely have an explanatory flavor, with the labels, seemingly describing some real or imagined process in some system we have yet to understand. I personally think that such a genius would use visuals to aid their explanations and proto-scientific musings. Perhaps this conlang was not just the language that they wrote in, but the language that they THOUGHT in. What if it helped them to more clearly understand or visualize certain theories by using their constructed language rather than the natural language(s) they almost certainly knew?