Latin analogy

In an intriguing passage in one of his lesser works, Nicholas of Cusa, Platonist, makes an analogy concerning a layman trying to read a Latin manuscript.

[The situation is] as if a layman who did not know the meaning of the words were to read aloud from some book: the reading aloud would proceed by the power of reason. For he would read aloud by making inferences regarding the differences of the letters, which he would combine and separate; and this would be the work of reason. Yet, he would remain ignorant of [the content of] what he was reading aloud.

The translator, Jasper Hopkings, provides this illuminating explanation in the footnotes:

Ordinarily, a layman, who is an autodidact, would not know Latin, the language of most scholarly manuscripts in Nicholas’s day. Moreover, in the Latin manuscripts, not all individual words are properly separated by a word space. (Thus, at times, “adeo” is confusable with “a deo”.) Moreover, the letters “t” and “c” (as in “sic” or “sit”) may not be easily distinguishable. Or the combinations “im,” “mi” “ini” may not be differentiable without a sense of what the entire word is suppose to be. (Thus, “in eo”, which is often written without an intervening space, may be confused for “meo”.) A layman, who is not necessarily illiterate, might have learned how to expand the word-abbreviations used in Latin manuscripts and might have been taught how to pronounce Latin words—without, however, having learned to understand the meaning of Latin sentences.

Confronted as we are by the text in the Voynich manuscript, I find this analogy in Cusanus deeply suggestive. There is one school of thought that proposes the text is a system of Latin abbreviations. Certainly, some of the glyphs used in the alphabet are well-known as Latin abbreviation markers. The Voynich letter y   for example can be found in medieval Latin manuscripts as an abbreviation of the suffix -us. The Voynich script might very well be conceived as a set of Latin abbreviations. Indeed, it is a stronger possibility than many others. This passage in Cusanus becomes extremely interesting in that light.

I propose that the language that goes with the illustrations in the manuscript is Ladin. But what is Ladin but a barbarized Latin? I lean towards Latin solutions to the language and suggest that perhaps the language somehow addresses the gulf between the layman's and the scholar's Latin?

In the context, Cusanus is making a Platonic analogy with the natural sciences which Plato casts, in his Timaeus, as "a likely tale", a science of probabilities. The empirical scientist is like the layman who learns the speech of nature but does not know what it means. It has occurred to me that perhaps the Voynich manuscript is designed to put us in exactly that position, and that it is a type of pious hoax intended to teach an epistemological lesson. (I'm planning to write an article along those lines, just for fun.)

R. B.