Every time I look at it, I get the feeling someone had a vision. Maybe took something particularly great. Maybe was just a little too bat shit. Maybe drank bad mead?
Whatever the source for the excellent illustrations, they convey a strange land with compelling oddities. It is all fantastic!
I think the Voynich Manuscript was written by someone who let his/her part of the brain responsible for language understanding run in reverse, so generating a new language. This new language, "speaking in tongues", follows the rules of Universal Grammar, so all frequency analysis will point to it being a legit language, yet the language itself will be forever indecipherable. The same holds for the undeciphered Zodiac cyphers. The "one time pad" used by the creators was probably forgotten the next day.
The phenomena you mentioned (speaking in tongues) is called Glossolalia, and yeah, it is essentially rhythmic mouth yapping with enough resemblance to other 'human utterances' to be misread as an actual language.
I was once part of a youth group and was strongly pressured to do that.
My inhibition was profound. At that moment I gave organized religion up. I am not religious, but do seem spiritual. Go figure.
Between that and being told who to hate and what platinum album was gonna send me to hell, it was enough.
I could have done it that day. Make up some stuff, or just let the vocalizations flow. But why?
I did find the others listening to garner meaning super interesting. There is a sort of resonance possible too. Speakers, or utterers more precisely, pick up common elements. The whole affair becomes sort of tribal.
Over time, all sorts of status, membership, meta basically, is inferred through many sessions.
Yeah this was fun to read about when the Guardian mentioned it a week or so back. The guy appears to have invented a language (Proto-Romance) and made claims that this was the usual script for said language, and cracked decoding it. And all this after only two weeks study.
Anything that can shed new light on the book is intriguing, but I'm not buying this without extraordinary evidence.
"Extrapolated" might be a better term than "invented", to be fair to him. His "Proto-Romance" seems to be an attempt to extrapolate an intermediate between Vulgar Latin and the early Romance languages after they had differenciated into Old French, Old Spanish, Old Portuguese, &c.
"Proto-Romance" is a real term, but it's typically used to refer to Vulgar Latin.
Speaking as someone with a linguistics background, I would say "cobbled together" is more accurate. Cheshire's "proto-Romance" was built by choosing words more or less at random from various Romance dictionaries (and a few non-Romance ones) without coming up with a rigorous explanation of the grammar or the sound changes which produced this result.
Usually, if you're proposing a proto-language, you need to give a consistent and reasonable set of rules that have both explanatory and predictive capability in terms of one language becoming another. I can posit a rule, for example, that a Latin b in between vowels becomes a v in Italian: the Latin taberna becomes the Italian taverna, the Latin diabolus becomes the Italian diavolo, the Latin habere becomes the Italian avere. This rule means that given a Latin word, I can predict what an Italian word descended from it would look like, and similarly, if I have an Italian word, I can speculate what the Latin word it descended from would look like if it were indeed of Latin origin.
The Cheshire paper makes no effort to explain the rules that get you from Latin to his "Proto-Romance", and in turn to modern Romance languages. It's all ad-hoc, based on grabbing whatever happened to resemble his decoding, which is why words are borrowed from wherever he could find a match.
(Also: to be totally pedantic, the b-becomes-v rule mentioned above is not the complete story, and there are exceptions, e.g. Latin habitus becomes Italian abito. It's a good first approximation, though.)
I really wonder if its not in the Protong language, from Szukalski .. if there are any linguists reading this who are familiar with either the Voynich manuscript or Szukalski, perhaps you have some insight on whether this may be the case?
Protong has always fascinated me as a theory and an artefact of a very, very imaginative mind - but as the years go by, and more and more pre-history gets unearthed, I find myself wondering just whether or not Szukalski was onto something. His theories on Zermatism are heinous and very, very repugnant (racism) but the idea that there was a global proto-tongue that was spoken by a civilisation that covered the globe, only to be lost during a cataclysm, is very compelling nevertheless.
I haven't looked into Protong in depth, but at a first glance, it looks it takes some lightly motivated ideas as substrate and builds pseudoscientific nonsense on top of them.
The idea that all human language stems from a common source is not an uncommon hypothesis. This hypothetical language is sometimes called proto-human or proto-world, and there have been some attempts at reconstructing it, but it's also not a slam-dunk in terms of evidence: other linguists believe in linguistic polygenesis, which is the idea that there were multiple independently-evolved ancestor languages, and both positions have some evidence for them. Still, there are linguists who believe in it and are working towards understanding what it might have looked like.
Any specific reconstruction of proto-human, though, is difficult, and would need to be subjected to a pretty rigorous set of criteria. There have been attempts along these lines, sometimes using statistical methods, sometimes using comparative reconstruction (which is the linguistic technique of extrapolating a common ancestor between multiple related languages), but languages change a lot—especially if they don't have a written language, which was the norm for most world languages until recently—so merely extrapolating a few hundred years back can be difficult and involve a lot of guesswork and masses of evidence. Going tens of thousands of years back is truly grasping at straws, and as such any proposal along these lines is going to have to be as bulletproof as possible. (Indeed, a large number of linguists believe that enough information has been lost since a proto-human language might have existed, that such a reconstruction is in fact impossible!)
Protong specifically looks like it involves a lot of playing with semantics in a way that doesn't match what we know about how languages evolve. There's a lot of, "Well, this language has a word that sounds like this and means 'murderer', and that language has a word that sounds like this and means 'run', and you run from bad things and also murderers are bad, so that's a proto-word that means 'bad'." That's not how language evolution works, and if you accept those kinds of arguments, you could make just as convincing a case that any language has any relationship you want to any other language! The classic example of this is from the Dutch physician Johannes Goropius Becanus, who believed that the original primordial language as spoken in the Garden of Eden was his native dialect of Antwerpian Dutch: for example, he suggested that the name Adam came from the Dutch Hath-Dam, or "dam-against-hate". If you can use your argument to "prove" that Biblical Hebrew was descended from Dutch, then you're not using a robust argument.
And to address the original question: if we have such difficulty reconstructing a proto-language now, with our wealth of collected and available knowledge, it would have been an impossibly difficult task in a Europe that had not yet deciphered Egyptian or had extensive contact with the New World. Consequently: even if the monogenetic hypothesis of language is true, and even if proto-human is a reconstructible language (whether it resembles Protong or not), it would be vanishingly unlikely that a person or group of people had managed to reconstruct it with enough accuracy that they could write an entire manuscript in an invented writing system that happened to mirror it. Given all this, I'm absolutely confident in saying that the Voynich manuscript is not in Protong or anything like it.
Thank you for a detailed and highly enlightening response.
>it would be vanishingly unlikely that a person or group of people had managed to reconstruct it with enough accuracy that they could write an entire manuscript in an invented writing system that happened to mirror it
What about the case where the author of the Voynich Manuscript still spoke the proto-human tongue, i.e. that it was authored in an environment where that language was still relatively active, and has since dissipated? We do know that there have been communities of humans that have persisted since pre-history - the Sentinelese. Its an idle speculation, but one has to wonder if their language has been studied well enough to have been applied to the Voynich solution.
Anyway, thanks again for the insight. Protong is a pet hobby of mine, but I don't take it fully seriously - I just happen to think the idea of an encoded, pre-historic language to be found in all ancient art is fascinating, even if not legitimate in terms of scientific accuracy. Its the programmer in me, I suppose, which hopes to see the assembly language instructions that make up a broader set of symbols...
The Voynich manuscript has been pretty reliably dated to the early 15th century by both carbon dating and by comparison of the materials, techniques, and style used in the manuscript—tens of thousands of years, at least, after a proto-human language would have been spoken. Language change happens pervasively, even in isolated speaker communities, so even if there had been some isolated enclave that cut off all contact when proto-human was still being spoken, it's vanishingly unlikely that they would have continued speaking perfectly preserved proto-human tens of thousands of years later: their enclave's language would almost certainly have gradually changed into a modern descendant, and the lack of contact with other languages would have made it appear to be a language isolate (i.e. a language with no observably related languages, such as Basque, Ainu, or Haida). That's not unlikely: in fact, if the proto-world hypothesis is correct, then that's how all language isolates did in fact form! But we have no evidence at all to suggest that a speaker community either would or could speak an unmodified form of a language for tens of thousands of years.
The Sentinelese language hasn't been studied at all—it's hypothesized that it's related to the nearby Ongan languages (spoken in the same island chain as Sentinel Island) but when Onge speakers have attempted to communicate with the Sentinelese, they haven't been able to understand what's being said. (Which doesn't disprove the hypothesis: English and German spring from a common ancestor, but if an English speaker heard German for the first time, they too would have no idea what was being said!) But as I said above: just because a group is isolated, that doesn't mean that their language isn't changing just as much as others—it might just be changing in different directions!
This was a low-effort post, but I agree that Derek Vogt/Stephen Bax's theory is under-appreciated. Other hypotheses are either nationalistic , working back from the author's favorite theory to justify why it's Hindi/Turkish/your culture here, or flavors of the null hypothesis, such as explaining away the linguistic patterns as a sophisticated bogus language.
Vogt starts by comparing the writing system to similar-looking classes, identifying internal (in)consistencies and testing the theories on likely cognates for stars and plants.
Derek did a good job with internal reconstruction, and in light of the recent star chart update someone with knowledge of Romani should attempt to falsify his hypothesis. You might not succeed, but honest historical linguistics is a satisfying journey.
If nothing else, to the non-expert like myself, at least this claim seems plausible. I've seen a wide range of other claims that seem way off-base. It seems unlikely to be of Meso-American origin, for instance.
I kind of hope it remains unsolved. The document is far more compelling as a mystery than whatever its contents might be.
Of all the Voynich theories, I find those suggesting it was produced through a mechanistic method to be most persuasive. Several statistical properties of the words just don't match up with any natural languages, and there is a large amount of repetition of individual words with small variations, but hardly any repeated phrases. One recent idea is that successive words were copied from early ones, with small rearrangements of the glyphs https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6639.pdf . As such, the text gains the characteristic of looking like a language, when in fact it is meaningless gibberish. Possibly this was done as way of fooling somebody rich to buy it; at some point it came into the possession of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, and was clearly a very desirable artifact even in the 17th century.
Hoax should be the hypothesis of last resort. If you have a theory that Voynich is written in a specific cipher or language, you can test it via internal consistency, reconstruction, cognates or sound laws. Statistically, Voynich has morpheme distributions typical of spoken language. Someone could have generated the text from a random distribution or method, but that's a non-falsifiable hypothesis.. given some statistics you can always generate such a trivial theory
23 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] threadEvery time I look at it, I get the feeling someone had a vision. Maybe took something particularly great. Maybe was just a little too bat shit. Maybe drank bad mead?
Whatever the source for the excellent illustrations, they convey a strange land with compelling oddities. It is all fantastic!
Should this prove to be trolling?
Epic whoever you were. Well played.
I was once part of a youth group and was strongly pressured to do that.
My inhibition was profound. At that moment I gave organized religion up. I am not religious, but do seem spiritual. Go figure.
Between that and being told who to hate and what platinum album was gonna send me to hell, it was enough.
I could have done it that day. Make up some stuff, or just let the vocalizations flow. But why?
I did find the others listening to garner meaning super interesting. There is a sort of resonance possible too. Speakers, or utterers more precisely, pick up common elements. The whole affair becomes sort of tribal.
Over time, all sorts of status, membership, meta basically, is inferred through many sessions.
Anything that can shed new light on the book is intriguing, but I'm not buying this without extraordinary evidence.
"Proto-Romance" is a real term, but it's typically used to refer to Vulgar Latin.
Usually, if you're proposing a proto-language, you need to give a consistent and reasonable set of rules that have both explanatory and predictive capability in terms of one language becoming another. I can posit a rule, for example, that a Latin b in between vowels becomes a v in Italian: the Latin taberna becomes the Italian taverna, the Latin diabolus becomes the Italian diavolo, the Latin habere becomes the Italian avere. This rule means that given a Latin word, I can predict what an Italian word descended from it would look like, and similarly, if I have an Italian word, I can speculate what the Latin word it descended from would look like if it were indeed of Latin origin.
The Cheshire paper makes no effort to explain the rules that get you from Latin to his "Proto-Romance", and in turn to modern Romance languages. It's all ad-hoc, based on grabbing whatever happened to resemble his decoding, which is why words are borrowed from wherever he could find a match.
(Also: to be totally pedantic, the b-becomes-v rule mentioned above is not the complete story, and there are exceptions, e.g. Latin habitus becomes Italian abito. It's a good first approximation, though.)
Protong has always fascinated me as a theory and an artefact of a very, very imaginative mind - but as the years go by, and more and more pre-history gets unearthed, I find myself wondering just whether or not Szukalski was onto something. His theories on Zermatism are heinous and very, very repugnant (racism) but the idea that there was a global proto-tongue that was spoken by a civilisation that covered the globe, only to be lost during a cataclysm, is very compelling nevertheless.
Szukalski, Protong:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcGlum9i9gQ
The idea that all human language stems from a common source is not an uncommon hypothesis. This hypothetical language is sometimes called proto-human or proto-world, and there have been some attempts at reconstructing it, but it's also not a slam-dunk in terms of evidence: other linguists believe in linguistic polygenesis, which is the idea that there were multiple independently-evolved ancestor languages, and both positions have some evidence for them. Still, there are linguists who believe in it and are working towards understanding what it might have looked like.
Any specific reconstruction of proto-human, though, is difficult, and would need to be subjected to a pretty rigorous set of criteria. There have been attempts along these lines, sometimes using statistical methods, sometimes using comparative reconstruction (which is the linguistic technique of extrapolating a common ancestor between multiple related languages), but languages change a lot—especially if they don't have a written language, which was the norm for most world languages until recently—so merely extrapolating a few hundred years back can be difficult and involve a lot of guesswork and masses of evidence. Going tens of thousands of years back is truly grasping at straws, and as such any proposal along these lines is going to have to be as bulletproof as possible. (Indeed, a large number of linguists believe that enough information has been lost since a proto-human language might have existed, that such a reconstruction is in fact impossible!)
Protong specifically looks like it involves a lot of playing with semantics in a way that doesn't match what we know about how languages evolve. There's a lot of, "Well, this language has a word that sounds like this and means 'murderer', and that language has a word that sounds like this and means 'run', and you run from bad things and also murderers are bad, so that's a proto-word that means 'bad'." That's not how language evolution works, and if you accept those kinds of arguments, you could make just as convincing a case that any language has any relationship you want to any other language! The classic example of this is from the Dutch physician Johannes Goropius Becanus, who believed that the original primordial language as spoken in the Garden of Eden was his native dialect of Antwerpian Dutch: for example, he suggested that the name Adam came from the Dutch Hath-Dam, or "dam-against-hate". If you can use your argument to "prove" that Biblical Hebrew was descended from Dutch, then you're not using a robust argument.
And to address the original question: if we have such difficulty reconstructing a proto-language now, with our wealth of collected and available knowledge, it would have been an impossibly difficult task in a Europe that had not yet deciphered Egyptian or had extensive contact with the New World. Consequently: even if the monogenetic hypothesis of language is true, and even if proto-human is a reconstructible language (whether it resembles Protong or not), it would be vanishingly unlikely that a person or group of people had managed to reconstruct it with enough accuracy that they could write an entire manuscript in an invented writing system that happened to mirror it. Given all this, I'm absolutely confident in saying that the Voynich manuscript is not in Protong or anything like it.
>it would be vanishingly unlikely that a person or group of people had managed to reconstruct it with enough accuracy that they could write an entire manuscript in an invented writing system that happened to mirror it
What about the case where the author of the Voynich Manuscript still spoke the proto-human tongue, i.e. that it was authored in an environment where that language was still relatively active, and has since dissipated? We do know that there have been communities of humans that have persisted since pre-history - the Sentinelese. Its an idle speculation, but one has to wonder if their language has been studied well enough to have been applied to the Voynich solution.
Anyway, thanks again for the insight. Protong is a pet hobby of mine, but I don't take it fully seriously - I just happen to think the idea of an encoded, pre-historic language to be found in all ancient art is fascinating, even if not legitimate in terms of scientific accuracy. Its the programmer in me, I suppose, which hopes to see the assembly language instructions that make up a broader set of symbols...
The Sentinelese language hasn't been studied at all—it's hypothesized that it's related to the nearby Ongan languages (spoken in the same island chain as Sentinel Island) but when Onge speakers have attempted to communicate with the Sentinelese, they haven't been able to understand what's being said. (Which doesn't disprove the hypothesis: English and German spring from a common ancestor, but if an English speaker heard German for the first time, they too would have no idea what was being said!) But as I said above: just because a group is isolated, that doesn't mean that their language isn't changing just as much as others—it might just be changing in different directions!
https://youtu.be/lhtZc-nFNt0
Vogt starts by comparing the writing system to similar-looking classes, identifying internal (in)consistencies and testing the theories on likely cognates for stars and plants.
Derek did a good job with internal reconstruction, and in light of the recent star chart update someone with knowledge of Romani should attempt to falsify his hypothesis. You might not succeed, but honest historical linguistics is a satisfying journey.
I kind of hope it remains unsolved. The document is far more compelling as a mystery than whatever its contents might be.
But... how would a medieval forger know about linguistic patterns of natural languages, that weren't discovered until centuries later?
The Turkish guy's hypothesis sounds like the most plausible.
(TL;DR: xkcd - D&D book; hyper_reality - scamming someone rich.)