Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 18 [1992 February 11] ----------------------------------------- Voynich Script and Linear B No no, I don't mean that! Please!! What I mean is this: the language of the Voynich MS is not the language for which its script was invented. And that's the analogy with Linear B. It was a Minoan syllabic script, and when the Mycenaeans invaded, the conquered scribes had to adapt it to represent Greek, which it does very badly. Hence 'wanaks', the word for "king" (no, xi wasn't around then) became 'wa-na-ko'. And 'tripos', their word for a distributed operating system, became 'ti-ri-po'. Here are some puzzling features of the Voynich orthography: 1. "The vowels are wrong" There are far too few single-letter vowels, and far too many cases of two or three adjacent vowel letters. Now, this could be because the language has shifted over time, as has French, for instance. But I don't think there has been enough time. More plausible, is that the script was invented for a language with a small number of pure vowels, and is being used to write a language with more vowels, less pure vowels, and diphthongs. 2. The frequencies of the presumed consonants. There are many letters of very, very low frequency, as if the sounds they represent were present in the original language, but absent in the new one. The same problem with what seem to be contracted forms: there are some contractions that hardly ever occur, so why bother, and some groups that are repeated over and over, and are obvious candidates for contractions. 3. The presumed "hands" and "dialects". In the middle ages, there were many dialects of spoken Latin, but the orthography remained stable, because it was based on a prior standard. The same is true of modern English. If the MS contains A and B dialects, one reason the spelling could be so different is that both scribes were spelling phonetically - which suggests there was no standard orthography. And that is not the case with the Latin of the time, nor the Italian. Even if we go to England, no fan of good spelling, the orthography was by then gradually converging onto the London dialect. 4. The letter c't. The author of the script seems to have a fierce hatred of diacritical marks. In that, he went much against the temper of the times, which loved abbreviations, and superfices, and twiddles of all kinds growing around the letters. He did not. Every letter is a continuous, cursive form. Except c't, which looks like ct with an exaggerated Greek smooth breathing. One wild speculation, that I've had before, is that this represents a consonant that did not exist in the original language, but that was common in the new one, and whose sound was close in some way to the sound of ct. So a new letter was invented - just as, when Turkey romanised their language, they invented a new vowel symbol, the roman i without the dot over it. End of speculation. Except for one more: I believe I can make a good guess at where the script came from. Take your compasses, place the point upon the Isle of Minorca, and draw a quarter-circle to the north west, between the Ebro and the Rhone. Yes, that's the old Septimania. Somewhere in there, unless several analogies have led me wrong. Robert