Some basic questions

The Voynich manuscript has been studied to death, but it is still devilishly difficult to have clarity about even basic questions. Here are a few, with answers from within the perspective of a Cusanus Ladin hypothesis:

Do the illustrations and the text go together?

Almost certainly. There are proposals that the pictures look like a herbal but the text is really about secret military plans to reconquer Constantinople, and such like, but the safest assumption is that image and text go together. The text is some sort of commentary upon, an accompaniment to, the pictures and diagrams. It is safe to assume the text and the pictures are about the same thing.

Do the illustrations and the (plaintext) language go together?

Likely, but not necessarily. Latin, Ladin, German or Italian might go with the illustrations, in historical context. Greek, Arabic, Hebrew etc. would be external languages. It is possible, but less likely, the pictures might show the Ladin herbal tradition but the text is in Greek, for instance. More likely the plaintext is in a local language. Some exotic languages like Chinese or Filipino come up in computational studies, but they would be entirely remote from the illustrations which are clearly European. They are very unlikely.

Do the script and the illustrations go together?

Possibly, but not necessarily. The script might have been created for other purposes. It appears that scribes were very familiar with it as if well-practiced. But we have no other instances of it – none – which suggests it is exclusive to this work (and therefore designed for the task.) Let’s rephrase the question:

Is the script designed especially for use in this work?

Possibly, but not necessarily. Perhaps a strong possibility. It does seem as if someone, for whatever reasons, designed a new script for the purposes of writing this book. The task required a new script and system of glyphs. There is no evidence at all that the script existed prior to this work (or was used afterwards.)

What is it about the work that necessitated a new script?

It is difficult to say. There are many possible reasons, none of them compelling. Concealment is the obvious one. But on the evidence of the illustrations, which are copious, the work seems innocuous. There seems no reason to hide the content unless the text is much more heretical or concerns more sensitive matters than the illustrations.

Is it a new script to record a previously unwritten language?

Perhaps. A new script would define an ethnic tongue as distinct. This would not be altogether unusual in a period when vernacular languages were forming distinct identities. The obvious language in context would be Ladin, but we know that Ladin was easily accommodated by the Roman script (being close to Latin anyway.) It didn’t require a unique orthography, unless the script is designed to make the language distinct from others as a means of defining it and/or as a nationalist gesture. There is little or no evidence supporting these conjectures.

What other reasons could there be?

The script – perhaps the language – could be experimental. Or it could be a private shorthand. That has often been suggested: that it is a previously unknown system of Latin shorthand. That should be counted as a good possibility. We have an astrological herbal with a Latin commentary, but the commentary has been cast in an unfamiliar system of shorthand with its own newly assembled system of notation. There is no motive to conceal – it is just that we cannot read the shorthand. We are left with the question: why invent a new system of Latin shorthand? That question might be easier to answer than many others.

R. B.