A semantic encoding system?

[Rafal]

I love it! The VMS is 2 centuries earlier, I guess a philosophical language of some sort is possible, although it’s not a highly likely scenario.

I would agree. We canot exclude it but a lot of stuff doesn't really fit this scenario.

One thing, as it was already said, is that philosophical languages started to appear much later than Voynich Manuscript, in the 1600s, and are generally a product of Enlightenment epoch. Voynich Manuscript appeared in different time and in different culture.

These languages were also "half-baked", if you ask me. All the effort usually went into inventing the words and building hierarchies of words where similar concepts, let's say colours, had the same word root and differed only by a single letter or so. On the other hand the authors usually didn't care much about grammar and just copied it from their native languages. Have a look at Wilkins example - it just copies the exact word order from the English text, keeping all quirks of English language like "the" word:



Such philosophical language would have the same patterns like English. For example the "and" word is the most common one in English texts and so it would be in the language of Wilkins. But Voynich Manuscript doesn't have such patterns. We don't have a good candidate for "and" word.

I guess we could say that if Voynichese is a conlang then it has some really alien grammar. Or maybe not necessarily alen, just not European as some people suggest on these forums