Hello all,
I want to interject and say that I found out in actuality the MS has almost a quarter order of magnitude more "words" than I thought; the musing on a cut down language relied on the false idea the MS had only 6000 "words." Given that there is comparatively very little in terms of Medieval conlangs in comparison to the wealth thereof today, but also in consideration of the weirdness of the VMS as a whole, I think it is possible that it could have been written in a conlang, however given that the modern discipline of linguistics would not arise until centuries later and that to my knowledge many of the Medieval conlangs were simply You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of a language they knew, unless a new grammar was invented entirely, which to me just teeters on implausibility for some early 15th-century scribes to do, the relationships between the words would not be all that unique to that of a natural language.
My thought process is just that people have been searching how to reconcile the writing system with some natural language since people have been studying the MS, and the concrete regularity of it refuses to budge to any possible mapping, be it a simple substitution or verbose one. At the same time, there seems to be enough structural coherency in the document itself (by that I mean the apparent "topics" of the paragraphs) to suggest it does have actual content to it, and the only reconciliation between the two is that the letters were chosen in accordance to some system that has nothing to do with the representation of phonemes. But if that were the case, if it were, say, German, we could still tell with the presence of the same relatively few articles present before every noun or so...
I want to interject and say that I found out in actuality the MS has almost a quarter order of magnitude more "words" than I thought; the musing on a cut down language relied on the false idea the MS had only 6000 "words." Given that there is comparatively very little in terms of Medieval conlangs in comparison to the wealth thereof today, but also in consideration of the weirdness of the VMS as a whole, I think it is possible that it could have been written in a conlang, however given that the modern discipline of linguistics would not arise until centuries later and that to my knowledge many of the Medieval conlangs were simply You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of a language they knew, unless a new grammar was invented entirely, which to me just teeters on implausibility for some early 15th-century scribes to do, the relationships between the words would not be all that unique to that of a natural language.
My thought process is just that people have been searching how to reconcile the writing system with some natural language since people have been studying the MS, and the concrete regularity of it refuses to budge to any possible mapping, be it a simple substitution or verbose one. At the same time, there seems to be enough structural coherency in the document itself (by that I mean the apparent "topics" of the paragraphs) to suggest it does have actual content to it, and the only reconciliation between the two is that the letters were chosen in accordance to some system that has nothing to do with the representation of phonemes. But if that were the case, if it were, say, German, we could still tell with the presence of the same relatively few articles present before every noun or so...