Re: VMs: could it not be a hoax (I would like it not to be it)

[Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fair point - there were probably quite a few more languages around then,
and some improbable-sounding ones that are still around today. (For
instance, Frobisher's expedition brought back an Inuit speaker, who
appears to have remained in Europe, and was around roughly when the VMS
first appears.) However, there are features of Voynichese which don't fit
with any natural language, as far as I know, such as the frequent
reduplication of the commonest "words". A certain amount of reduplication
occurs in some natural languages, such as Nepali "ali ali", meaning "a
little", but this is not on the scale of reduplications and near
reduplications ("chedy chedy" or "chedy shedy") in Voynichese, as far as I
know. The same argument applies (again, as far as I know) to the theory
that Voynichese "words" are actually syllables of a natural language. So
I'll stick for the moment with my claim that a natural language isn't a
likely candidate.

The glossolalia argument also hits problems - classic glossolalia is
pretty linguistically impoverished, schizophrenic rants don't have the
same sort of structures as Voynichese, and the most elaborated example of
a language generated in an altered state, Helene Smith's Martian, could be
mapped easily onto the structure of French. Similarly, the syntax of
Enochian (otherwise a prime candidate as a source for Voynichese) maps
neatly onto the syntax of Elizabethan English.

The synthetic language argument is more attractive, and I'd welcome any
information anyone has about the characteristics of synthetic languages.

Best wishes,

Gordon

Rene Zandbergen wrote:

> --- Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > We can more or less rule out the possibility that
> > the VMS is a non-encoded exotic
> > language whose words correspond to Voynichese word
> > breaks, since no natural language
> > shows the more exotic features of Voynichese.
>
> I'm not quite ready to subscribe to that, although
> it depends a bit on what one calls 'non-encoded'.
> Is: 'rendering in a new script' a language
> that is originally written in another script
> (e.g. Arabic) or not written at all, a form of
> encoding or not? A couple of years ago I found
> out that there is a language spoken in S.Italy
> even today that is not written down. OK, it is a
> Romance language (called Faetar), so not a
> candidate for us. But how many more such languages
> could have existed 500 years ago?
>
> > That still leaves a variety of possibilities,
> > including the following:
> > 1: a natural language whose syllables correspond to
> > Voynichese "words" (e.g. the
> > Chinese hypothesis)
> > 2: an encoded form of a natural language not widely
> > spoken in Europe 1470-1586, and
> > therefore not yet investigated by cryptographers
> > 3: an unusual cypher (or an ordinary cypher
> > concealed in a lot of gibberish)
> > 4: a hoax
>
> For me, a hoax implies a deliberate attempt to
> deceive. This may not have been on the VMs writer's
> mind. It is eminently possible that he meant well
> but still wrote gibberish that is not understandable
> to anyone. So we need to add:
> 5) gibberish (glossolalia)
>
> Furthermore, we should add:
> 6) synthetic language
>
> All options can be questioned, but in my opinion
> the 'hoax' theory is just one of several remaining
> options - not the most likely.
>
> Cheers, Rene
>
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