Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

[DorotheeM]

So now, challenge me, roast me. As sooner I know where my false assumptions are, the sooner I can adopt my approach.

Hi!

I'm not sure what to challenge here, is there any specific evidence pointing towards Maltese? I think Maltese has been discussed before, but I can't find it now.

Also, for a midwifery book, I find the total lack of babies in the images a bit unexpected.

From my search engine:

The possibility of Maltese as the language of the Voynich Manuscript has been discussed by several researchers. Emma May Smith considered Maltese due to its historical context, its status as a Semitic language written in Roman script, and the potential for its unvoweled nature to explain the manuscript's characteristics. [3] Michael Zakaria also raised the possibility of the text being an archaic creole, or a variant of Latinized Siculo-Arabic, similar to modern Maltese. [10] In 1991, Jacques Guy speculated whether one of the two proposed "languages" in the manuscript could be Maltese, suggesting a connection to Sabir dialects spoken by Venetian and Maltese individuals. [1] R.S. Richmond noted in 1997 that while Semitic languages are usually written without all vowels, Maltese is fully vocalized. [5] More recently, in 2022, a peer-reviewed paper by Caruana, Layfield, and Abela, based in Malta, acknowledged the limitations of their language coverage in comparing the Voynich Manuscript to only Old English and Old Italian. [15] They noted that resources for low-resource languages like Maltese are limited, despite their team being well-placed to study it. [15] On the voynich.ninja forum in 2021, VViews expressed a wish for Maltese to have been included in such comparisons, while also noting the scarcity of surviving Maltese texts from before the 1485 Kantilena. [16]

Sources:
[1] voynich.nu mailing list a1991 — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[3] Summary of my views on the Voynich Manuscript — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[5] voynich.nu mailing list a1997C — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[10] Nick Pelling - a response — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[15] An Analysis of the Relationship between Words within the Voynich Manuscript (Caruana, Layfield & Abela 2022) — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[16] Dr. Colin Layfield and Dr. John Abela are doing research on the VMS — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Thank you for the summary, I just checked all of the sources. There is just a little paralipomenon I'd like to add to [5]: Maltese is nowadays vocalized, true. At the time of the VMS, it hasn't been scripted at all or ar least all attempts from then are lost, in which latter case we won't know how it was set up usually.  From other languages and the given assumptions, my first guess it was written within  MS with 3 vowels covering some range, roughly described as: <a>, <(e)/i> and <(o)/u>, maybe additionally with a ligatur for short or long. This pairing is rooted in the approximity of sounds, that would make it hard to differ for non-native speakers. That would mostly cover the scheme in Arabian, too.