VMs: Manchu hypothesis and Fraser

["Peter Jacobi" <peter_jacobi@xxxxxxx>]

Dear List Members,

I just stumbled into the Voynich Manuscript issue (by a strange association
chain: a Slashdot Discussion of the Colossus code breaker [1]; there was a
link to a short article [2] by Dennis Ritchie which mentioned Voynich, then
some Googling)

Anyway, I found in the mailing list's archives the new Manchu hypothesis and
wanted to offer a "parallel".

In 1915 the missionary James Ostram Fraser invented a 41 letter alphabet [3]
for writing the language of the Lisu [4]. This is a language of the
Tibeto-Burmese family. I assume there are other similiar cases, but that's
the one I remembered.

So, a traveller dedicated to this task, can invent an alphabet for a
language which hasn't a script or whose script he find incomprehensible.

And he would borrow elements of the script he used for his native language:
- Alphabetic script (vowels and consonants)
- Left-to-right writing
- Seperating words by spaces

Of course Fraser Script looks much more like Latin, but that's because
Fraser wanted to be able to typeset the script with normal Latin letters,
something the author of the Voynich manuscript wouldn't have been concerned
about.

Best Regards,
Peter Jacobi

[1]
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/01/1153215&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=172&tid=93

[2] http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/crypt.html

[3] http://pedroiy.free.fr/alphabets/fraser.htm

[4] http://www.chsource.org/Lisu.htm


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