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Hi all,
My name is Robert Brantley. I have been
subcribing for several months now, without posting - I haven't had anything that
I thought would add to the discussion. I first read about the VMS in
an article in an astronomy magazine ( I forget which one) several years
ago. I am a Computer Scientist by trade, but have interests in a wide
variety of topics.
Last week I was at the C. R. Smith Aviation Museum
in Arlington TX with my youngest son and wife. One of the display
cases was labeled 'Blood Chits'. I had never heard of a
blood chit before so this caught my attention. As I got close enough to
the case to the see the writing on one of the documents in the display, I was
stunned. When I first saw it, I thought it was voynich script. Close
up, I could see that it wasn't, ofcourse, but the scripts did bare a striking
resemblence to the VMS script.
For those of you that don't know, Blood
Chits are documents issued to military pilots in case they are shot
down. They are usually written in several languages common to the
area where the pilot is flying. Basically they just state that anyone
helping the pilot return safely to his base will be rewarded.
This particular blood chit was written in Burhmese
and Tamilese and several other languages (Tagalese was another, if memory
doesn't fail me). It was carried by an American pilot during WWII.
The Burhmese script in this document resembled Voynich script more than any
other writing I have ever seen. Since then I have looked at samples of
Burhmese script on the web, but haven't found any examples that look that
similar to what I saw in the C. R. Smith museum.
After looking at the VMS for several years I was
pretty much convinced that a lot of the 'words' represented number (or cabalist
computations) due to the high frequency of repeated phrases and similar 'words'
that vary just by a single character. But now I think there might be
another possibility. Perhaps this tendency to self similar repition in the
'words' is due to the script being syllabic alphabetic?
I am definitely not a linguist, I have plenty of
trouble with just English ;) But the script seems to me to be at
least influenced by Brahmi decended ways of writing. Perhaps the
language is of the Indo-Iranian family.
It seems pretty obvious that the VMS is of European
origins, the illustrations are definitely in a 'Western' style. So who
would write a book in Western Europe in the 15th or 16th century in an
Indo-Iranian language with a Brahmi decended script?
The only group I can think of is the
Romany.
Just my two cents worth.
Robert
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