Ladin and Latin

By my proposal, the Voynich manuscript concerns and depicts aspects the herbal traditions of the Ladin people from the alpine regions of northern Italy. Nicholas of Cusa was made prince-bishop of Brixen and so became bishop over the Ladin speaking communities in the 1450s. I propose that the Voynich ms. is the result of that encounter - Cusean thought and Cusean cosmology applied to the traditions of the Ladin (who have the Rosengarten mountains in the Dolomites as the centre of their world.)

Accordingly, I would expect LADIN to be a language of interest in the study of the Voynich ms. It has been proposed before over the years. The manuscript is clearly not written in Ladin in the plain, yet from the historical context in which I want to place the work Ladin would be the language in the background. It is the language that corresponds to the illustrations in the manuscript. The legends and folklore concerning the nymphs depicted, for instance, are preserved in the Ladin language (and only in the Ladin language.)

But what is the Ladin language? As the name suggests, it is a type of  Latin. It was once widespread throughout alpine northern Italy. It is now confined to several language "islands" in remote valleys. Mussolini suppressed the language and treated it as a deviant Italian, but it is a distinct language with ancient origins. It is a remnant of the language spoken by Roman soldiers who settled the region in the first century BC., fused, it is believed, with pre-Roman Rhaeto-Etruscan.

The mythology and folklore of Ladin is of enormous interest today because it shows signs of being exceedingly ancient. Some of the motifs and mythic structures are believed to extend back to the Iron Age. This means there has been linguistic continuity in the Ladin oral tradition since very ancient times. It is a treasury of ancient linguistic relics.

The modern language, though, is a reconstruction formed under political pressures. In truth, Ladin survives in a highly fragmented form, with numerous tiny distinct dialects in different mountain regions. In the 20th C. the language was artificially consolidated into a standard form. The modern language, therefore, is not an entirely good guide to the medieval language. Ladin has changed in recent centuries.

In the 1400s it was the common language of the alpine regions of the County Tyrol. It was unwritten - although there is evidence of a document written in Ladin in the 1300s. The official language of the region was German, with Gallo-Italian influences from the south. Of course, the ecclesiastical language was Latin. Latin was the language of the educated. Ladin was the language of the unlettered. To put them side by side, Ladin must have seemed a barbaric, rustic form of Latin.

In my scenario, the high-church Latin scholar Cusanus (also proficient in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Catalan and a host of other languages) has a prolonged encounter with the Ladin people and their traditions. I draw attention to Cusanus' concern for the ways of the "Layman" to be seen in some of his minor works. He was intellectually interested in the wisdom and native intelligence, and the sciences (including herbalism) of the "Layman."

I cannot explain the Voynich language (who can?) but I do believe it is the outcome of the encounter between Nicholas of Cusa and the Ladin people. (The historical centre of Ladin culture, and the home of the Ladin museum today, is the bishop's residence in the Castle Tor in the Val Badia.)

One possibility here is that the script in the Voynich ms. has been invented in order to provide an orthography for Ladin. The glyph set would then map phonically to the sounds of spoken (medieval) Ladin. The text would then be a record of Ladin traditions, or similar. This seems unlikely in reality but it is not out of the question. It would be the natural outcome of my hypothesis.

It is unlikely, I think, because I doubt the Ladin formed a national, ethnic or linguistic identity until centuries later (and to a large extent until the modern era) and, just as Mussolini regarded Ladin as bad Italian, so in the 1400s was it likely to be regarded as bad Latin rather than a distinct and unique tongue needing its own script.

What this means is that it is LATIN that is the language at issue. When I point to Ladin I am pointing to a language within the immediate orbit of Latin. A strong body of researchers have proposed that the Voynich ms. is written in some form of Latin. Yet a formal high Latin wouldn't match the rustic folkish nature of the illustrations. And why would it require inventing a new script? Why is it not written in Roman script?

Identifying the manuscript as concerning Ladin traditions must also place German within the range of possibilities. The whole region is German speaking today, even though part of Italy, and was invaded by the Bavarians in the post-Roman centuries AD. It was German intrusions that forced the Ladin to retreat into the remote mountain valleys. Germanization has always been the greatest linguistic threat to the Ladin language communities.

In the 1400s German was, like today, the majority tongue of the region. Needless to say, Cusanus was a German. Tyrolean German, or some dialect thereof, presents itself as a candidate for the underlying language of the Voynich ms. (But, as it happens, German studies of the codex have more often suggested a nordic than a southern German as a possibility.)

There are, of course, degrees of literacy. Reading German in official documents is one level, whereas reading Church or classical Latin is another. German, Latin and Italian are the written languages of the Sudtirol in the relevant period, German and Italian being vernaculars and more likely to be within the reach of the "Layman".

Ladin itself remains for me the focus of interest. At very least, I would expect to see its influence in toponyms and labels, if not in the running text. Again: it is the language that preserves the folklore upon which the Voynich manuscript draws. By my reckoning, it must be part of the solution.

Some examples of written Ladin: