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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 wit

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...

andolanra 7y ago
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!

andolanra 7y ago

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!