MY Expanded Hypothesis.AquilaPausaLoquitur wrote: ↑Sun Apr 12, 2020 10:16 am
For some time (yes years!), i have been working on two assumptions:
1) the text is phonetic representation of a spoken language (not understood by writer?). Each "letter" is a sound.
IF IOU RIDE IT ALOUDE IOU HONNE DERE STANDE (that's roughly what I mean if a french writer were to register spoken english)
What if this is a travel journal of someone who knew multiple languages and was planning a pilgrimage to Jerusalem? They made a phonetic alphabet based on their known languages. That's not a cryptic symbol for 'P' that's a letter for the 'puh' sound. Making it as original as possible would make it less confusing to read. Because a German would pronounce the above French person's sentence completely different. Now this person can dictate anything another person is saying and read it back to them accurately. As they traveled through Greece perhaps they asked a local what this pretty plant is used for, if anything, and the answer is in Greek. It could also have been used for a learning tool to speak an unknown language.
Perhaps one page is in Latin and another in French. Maybe there is a part in Turkish and another in Hebrew. Once we can figure out this alphabet and read it aloud we can decipher what language it's in. The discrepancies could be dialect differences, common abbreviations, local euphemisms etc... We could put the pages in order according to a probable travel path. They could have taken the long way around on the trip back and that could account for some evidence of Chinese in there. Maybe they traveled along part of the Silk Road. What if the pages with stars are the same sentence in different languages? It could be a verbal Rosetta Stone for 14th century dialects? Can you imagine how exciting that would be?
Thoughts? Criticisms? I wish I knew medieval languages I would try to prove this. Alas, besides English I am no where near fluent enough in a language to translate and I doubt any part of this manuscript is in a form of English we would recognize.
If anyone knows of people who could help me with this hypothesis, please don't hesitate to spread the idea around, but I would like to follow where it goes.