VMs: Was the author a synaesthete?

[ajb <ajb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello

I wonder if our analysis of Voynichese fully takes into account the way
the author's brain happened to be made up? Let us imagine that he (she?)
had a highly idiosyncratic kind of cortical wiring, either native or
occasioned by some kind of accident or incident, such that he perceived
written words and language in a remarkably different way from most of
us? Suppose, for example, that a written word or phrase which we may
surmise to be a simple plant label (sorry!) was experienced directly and
physically by the author as something like "that shade of bluey-green I
particularly dislike, with a sort of sinister groan, the smell of old
weasels, and that peculiarly uneasy inner sensation which usually
immediately precedes major gastro-intestinal distress"?

It would certainly complicate matters........  Voynichese would then be
both a private language and simultaneously a cypher, one which decodes
itself transparently and automatically to the author only, and thus
requires no physical key.

I over-dramatise my theory, of course, but I do wonder if an element of
something like this might be an ingredient. (For example to me the very
look of written Voynichese has always tended to sound like a sort of dry
rustling, whereas this Courier face I type in usually rings like
minuscule bells, mostly slightly out of tune.)

Are there any true synaesthetes out there who would care to comment?

Regards

Anthony



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     ajb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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