New clue to Voynich manuscript mystery

It would be lovely if it were a surprise addition to the corpus of pre-Spanish meso-American language.

We do have a reasonable Nahuatl corpus, and it remains a (very minor) spoken language, so if it is such, there's a good chance it could be understood. But there's plenty of extinct indigenous languages with very little or no attestation, and if it's one of those, well, hopefully it's related to something we still know.

The orthography remains a problem, but it's quite plausible that some friar somewhere in Mexico came up with this European-derived script to transcribe the local language, and it didn't stick for any number of reasons. There are several non-standardized Latinesque orthographies we know (see Carochi) for Nahuatl, so it's a known phenomenon. (And there's still no standard system!) The hand of the Voynich seems reasonably practiced, so it must've had some use, but it could possibly still have been only one man over a few years. (It's clearly not an indigenous script.)

The friar involved could perhaps be called too clever for his own good; imagine if St Cyril wrote a few books in his script and then died of bad gruel, and some Pope got hold of them. Same sort of thing. If the (theoretical Spanish friar) Voynich author had been less inventive, we'd (if this theory is true) have long since understood it.

Anyway, hopefully a few Meso-American language experts can take a look and decide if there's a possible match.

Reading the paper, they make a lot of assertions that are a bit too confident like this plant is most definitely X and this is obviously Y. This is an interesting idea but just because they resemble some plants doesn't make them those plants all things considered.

Original article http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue100/hg100-feat-voy...

Well, it's a good theory. Being a manuscript from Mexico, it wouldn't be surprising if it had eluded many researchers, who often have an European-centric background. In Brazil there are also manuscripts in the native's, non-written language (tupi) codified by catholic priests dating back to XVI, but those are better understood because the language was kept alive up to the late XIX. If it weren't that, it would be undecipherable by now, maybe called a hoax too.

"If it was a hoax, then we have to invoke Jules Verne and his time machine."

I wonder if he meant H.G. Wells, or if that was a reference to Back to the Future III.

Obligatory http://xkcd.com/593/

I was going to write something similar, but nickpelling's comment is better than what I would have come up with:

"The shockingly dull truth is that, if you compare what these two authors have published in an American herbal medicine quarterly with the hundreds of bad Voynich theories out there, they're doing basically the same thing in basically the same way:-

"(1) fixating on a single observation that just happened to excite their imagination

"(2) doggedly following the logic of that single observation to the end

"(3) ignoring or dismissing all evidence that would seem to contradict their story"

The Voynich manuscript is one of my favorite mysteries. In a lot of ways, I hope it's never really solved.

Lost my interest when he mixed Jules Verne with H G Wells.