Voynich manuscript deciphered again

[Tropylium]

We can't rule out that some lost linguistic lineage survived just long enough in a remote valley in the Alps or the Appenines or wherever, such as a descendant of Etruscan

Was that a reference to this, or a serious theory? If the former, heh. If the latter, yeah.

I wasn't even aware of that one! It was just a suggestion what kind of language it could be.

Bold new hypothesis: the Voynich manuscript is written in a descendant of Linear A

[Vlürch]

He thought Romani formed as a separate language in India centuries before the Roma's ancestors left it? That in itself is already...bizarre.

I don't think he thought that? The way I interpreted what he said in that video (I still haven't rewatched the previous two, so I don't remember if he said that in one of them) is just that the Voynich manuscript is written in some variety of Romani (or a related language) that originated from India? Like, some Indians migrated to Italy and wrote the Voynich manuscript in their language, with no implications on (the languages of) other Indians who migrated west?

Bold new hypothesis: the Voynich manuscript is written in a descendant of Linear A

I guess if the Voynich manuscript's language is related to Minoan, it'd just be a matter of comparing Linear A romanisations to the Voynich manuscript using the EVA or something, but that's pretty time-consuming and boring and it probably still wouldn't lead to translations of either Linear A texts or the Voynich manuscript, so I don't know if anyone will ever have the time or motivation...

[Vijay]

He thought Romani formed as a separate language in India centuries before the Roma's ancestors left it? That in itself is already...bizarre.

I don't think he thought that? The way I interpreted what he said in that video (I still haven't rewatched the previous two, so I don't remember if he said that in one of them) is just that the Voynich manuscript is written in some variety of Romani (or a related language) that originated from India? Like, some Indians migrated to Italy and wrote the Voynich manuscript in their language, with no implications on (the languages of) other Indians who migrated west?

It doesn't make sense to talk about a variety of some language X splitting off from X several hundreds of years before X even exists! He says "...inferring that the Voynich language was a cousin of Romani, an Indic language brought from India to Europe when its speakers migrated, not exactly Old Romani itself, but at least a cousin that had split off from it in the previous few centuries."

Half of Romani's grammar comes from Greek. You can't split off from a language that gets half its grammar from Greek hundreds of years before its speakers' ancestors have ever been anywhere near Greece. Even if you said that he misspoke (which is kind of problematic in itself given the controversial nature of all of the claims surrounding something like the Voynich manuscript! But anyway...) and meant that the Voynich language split off from Romani's ancestor rather than from Romani itself, there's absolutely no reason to believe that Romani had any ancestor in India that isn't shared by at least some of the other remaining modern Indic languages. In that case, Romani would have no more relevance to the hypothesis than any of those other Indo-Aryan languages would, and you might as well just call it "the Indo-Aryan hypothesis."

[keenir]

Was that a reference to this, or a serious theory? If the former, heh. If the latter, yeah.

I wasn't even aware of that one! It was just a suggestion what kind of language it could be.

Bold new hypothesis: the Voynich manuscript is written in a descendant of Linear A

oooh...or the Manuscript is the result of somebody cracking Linear A -- and having jotted down their translation in a personal notation, which was basically a personal script that combined features of Linear A with one or more of the present-day (for the writer) scripts that he or she knew.

[Vlürch]

Does anyone know where to find or have saved the first pic that's missing from this post about Vogt's phonetics on Bax's site, which seems like it was the "phonetic" values of all letters according to him? Because that'd be one of the most important things for convenience when it comes to investigating his theory, having a clear correspondence chart so that all the suggested unintuitive values for the EVA letters (not to mention the di- and trigraphs) wouldn't have to be memorised...

In that case, Romani would have no more relevance to the hypothesis than any of those other Indo-Aryan languages would, and you might as well just call it "the Indo-Aryan hypothesis."

Everything you said makes sense, and at least I learned a lot of new information about Romani from it, so I'm not going to argue. So, yeah, he was incorrectly expanding the definition of "Romani" beyond all reason and nobody questioned it AFAIK (or at least I didn't); I'd assume because "Romani" is what Indians who migrated west and their language(s) are called so it's convenient, but anyway, that doesn't make it correct and you're right that "Indo-Aryan" would definitely be a more appropriate term, so at least I'll use that from now on.

Since you're a Romani expert and know a lot about Indo-Aryan languages in general, how do you feel about it? Things like the list of possible cognates in this post and whatnot? Because a lot of them seem too convincing to me to be coincidence, but (like you probably know by now) my brain tries its hardest to not have to accept that coincidences are real, so I'm biased...

[Vijay]

Most of the forms in Indo-Aryan languages listed there seem to be Arabic loanwords (via Persian, of course). The words for potato are borrowed from Portuguese.

[keenir]

I just had a horrible thought, and I hope I'm not the first to contemplate this:
Those sites state that the Manuscript was written from right to left...so, basically "yawsihtemdaer". (to invent & give it an arbitrary meaning)

When people've applied their anti-cryptography and language-matching to the Manuscript, which way are they reading? Left to right, which a search for meaning might give (to continue my above example) "Ya W. Si, h. Te m. Da, er." which frustratingly almost fits a 'CV C' theory.

When what it actually says is "Read Me This Way"


(i think i may need more sleep)

[zompist]

You can easily find pages from the manuscript online. It's not hard to conclude that it was written left-to-right: the left margin is straight and the right one is ragged; and there are paragraphs, where the last line ends far short of the margin. That comes naturally with LTR writing, but would be weird and hard to do with RTL.

[KathTheDragon]

There are also lines where the left-most character is fancily written, which also makes sense only with left-to-right.

[Nortaneous]

Does anyone know where to find or have saved the first pic that's missing from this post about Vogt's phonetics on Bax's site, which seems like it was the "phonetic" values of all letters according to him? Because that'd be one of the most important things for convenience when it comes to investigating his theory, having a clear correspondence chart so that all the suggested unintuitive values for the EVA letters (not to mention the di- and trigraphs) wouldn't have to be memorised...

It's in his Youtube videos, but the chart below looks right. $ = ts, - = silent, only one nasal letter, gallows letter + ch = aspirate.

[Vlürch]

Most of the forms in Indo-Aryan languages listed there seem to be Arabic loanwords (via Persian, of course). The words for potato are borrowed from Portuguese.

Mmh, so do you think that more or less conclusively means it couldn't be an Indo-Aryan language?

It's in his Youtube videos, but the chart below looks right. $ = ts, - = silent, only one nasal letter, gallows letter + ch = aspirate.

Oh, thanks. I feel really blind and stupid right now, somehow I completely missed the chart in the wordlist pic...

[Vijay]

Most of the forms in Indo-Aryan languages listed there seem to be Arabic loanwords (via Persian, of course). The words for potato are borrowed from Portuguese.

Mmh, so do you think that more or less conclusively means it couldn't be an Indo-Aryan language?

Yeah, pretty much. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of a relationship with Indo-Aryan.

[Moose-tache]

Frankly I'm surprised at how few crackpots have taken a serious shot at the Tyrrhenian angle. A niece of Etruscan or Rhaetian would probably fit the phonotactics of the Voynich manuscript (for example, many transcription schemes suggest that the VMS has only one back vowel or one that is far more common than the other), and could have been spoken in the area of northern Italy. For a lark, I grabbed a random Online Etruscan Wordlist (tm), and scanned a few pages. Does the word "pulum" (star) appear on any of the astrological pages? Do Etruscan numbers appear along the edges of any calendrical diagrams? Sadly, no. But this is definitely one of the more fun diversions regarding the imminent translation of the Voynich Manuscript and its ancient secrets. We should see more of these.

[WeepingElf]

Frankly I'm surprised at how few crackpots have taken a serious shot at the Tyrrhenian angle. A niece of Etruscan or Rhaetian would probably fit the phonotactics of the Voynich manuscript (for example, many transcription schemes suggest that the VMS has only one back vowel or one that is far more common than the other), and could have been spoken in the area of northern Italy. For a lark, I grabbed a random Online Etruscan Wordlist (tm), and scanned a few pages. Does the word "pulum" (star) appear on any of the astrological pages? Do Etruscan numbers appear along the edges of any calendrical diagrams? Sadly, no. But this is definitely one of the more fun diversions regarding the imminent translation of the Voynich Manuscript and its ancient secrets. We should see more of these.

I try not to be a crackpot, but then I don't believe I could decipher the Voynich Manuscript, but the idea that a Tyrrhenian language surviving in a remote valley in the Alps or the Apennines for long enough to be used by a 15th-century Italian magician to write a repository of hermetic knowledge in it is IMHO an attractive one. Maybe not very likely, but at least possible!

[Nortaneous]

The letter statistics look more East Asian than anything else to me, but they don't accord with what I'd expect...

What if the VMS was a copy made by someone who didn't understand the text, and the original didn't have spaces? Could that explain the weird positional distributions? If the original scribe semi-regularly inserted larger-than-usual gaps before/after certain letters, they'd end up preferring initial/final position in the VMS 'words', and the other letters would end up preferring medial position.

[Moose-tache]

What if the VMS was a copy made by someone who didn't understand the text, and the original didn't have spaces? Could that explain the weird positional distributions? If the original scribe semi-regularly inserted larger-than-usual gaps before/after certain letters, they'd end up preferring initial/final position in the VMS 'words', and the other letters would end up preferring medial position.

If that were the case the position frequencies would break down for words in isolation. To my knowledge, single isolated words show the same patterns of letter position as other words.