Re: VMs: Another ... almost unreadable book (not directly VMS-related)

[Mart Vabar <mesinik@xxxxxx>]

THE LORE OF A XVI-SIECLE HYMN-BOOK


This is the story of a book, which was NOT intended to be an unreadable cipher, 
but malheureusement, it (practically) happened to be a such one...

In 1590-something, most of Estonia (and Livonia of these old days) happened 
to be temporarily under Polish control. For Poland, the Catholic belief was 
important - it was the matter of politics.

So, almost together with the troops arrived the jesuit scholars - with 
instructions and means (money) to supply local people with Catholic books.
One important thing, they had to do, was to translate a Catholic hymnal into 
Estonian language.  But it seems, they hurried too much with this work. The 
language of the book printed by them happened to be almost incomprehensible.

The reason, of course, was that there was not very many Estonian books these 
days (and many of them have survived and are pretty readable). Also, the few 
people, who had a practical feeling in Estonian tongue, was afraid of the 
Polish troops.


MV


PS
So, if we take a man, who writes in a dialect of a unknown tongue (which could 
be today a dead language) and he does not  know this language too well ...
 ... so we get another working hypotesis for VMS ...


PPS
But really, can we see somewhere (in the internet) all these common shorthands 
etc, from where the Voynich-letters are derivated? If most of the letters really 
are "ordinary", so we can probably guess from where the writer came.

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