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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
by andolanra 7y ago
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.
- fit2rule 7y agoThank 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...
- andolanra 7y agoThe 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!