(21-08-2025, 09:59 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
The dominant alphabets in Europe are the Latin and Greek alphabets because these were the dominant cultures.
That's wrong.
Latin and (indirectly) Greek were the dominant alphabets of
western europe.
Greek (in it's Byzantine version) has had it's time und was quickly losing ground in south-east europe , which ended 1453AD with the fall of constantinople.
In
east- and northeast europe, Latin and Greek had never such domination;
Glagolithic dominated huge slavic regions, the newer Cyrillic just began to develop and spread at 14th/15th century. It spreaded the (east roman) Christianity also.
If you want to talk about cultures:
the most dominant culture, reaching deep into europe, was the Mongol Empire in all is branches and chanats, for centuries.
The Mongols alone used several different alphabets over their time - Moscow and Kiev were small principalities and had to pay for their safety.
The combination of Lithuania and Poland had stopped the mongols' rush to West and used the upcoming Ruthenic alphabet, a flavour of cyrillic.
None of the western-european countries or smaller units were anyhow culturally relevant, the big times of Roman and East-Roman were gone at ~1450AD, the Romans' for 1,000 years already.
Some Italian city-states had their phase as major trading powers, but that was limited.
(21-08-2025, 09:59 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But when we look at the VMS we see characters that do not appear elsewhere. [..]
That's wrong.
Single characters of VMS tend to appear, at least as similar-looking letters, in nearly every known alphabet of that period, but never more than a few, and never a full set which would allow an allocation.
Claudette Cohen showed in her blog the origin of Old Permic script, by St. Stephen (Khrap) (You are not allowed to view links.
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this monk created in a one-man-mission an alphabet which leaned several letters and produced some new ones --
this was for finno-ugric speaking Perm people who had no own alphabet only a few decades before VMS.
By the way, Glagolitic was a two-man-stunt by just 2 monks, Cyrill and Method.
Some west-caucasian languages had no own alphabet until today and use an extended Georgian version, but this does not exclude early tries to gain one for themselves.
In northeast europe, some few smaller languages nearly or fully disappeared meanwhile, but it is known that a first Livonian Bible version (printed allready) was seized and destroyed at the beginning of 16th ct by german crusaders.
--> whoever claims that there was "no new [or new-old] writing system upcoming during the VMS time" would have to prove that all existing languages in europe and even Levante/Anatolia faced never a try to establish an adapted or constructed alphabet.
As shown, this could have been even the idea of just one man alone.
There are more than enough failed "solutions" in Latin and Greek upon this graveyard list here, but just a few for the smaller languages of europe (and other regions). Where is the proof for that statement above?
Thereby the only thing allowed to say is:
Nowadays, we can be certain beyond reasonable doubt, that the Voynich MS is not an example of Latin and Greek.