The news spread widely in the media that it was finally possible to decipher the famous Voynich manuscript, the mystery of which had been fought for about a century. The source of the news is a press release from the University of Bristol, whose employee Gerard Cheshire is the author of the proposed transcript. An article outlining his hypothesis was published by the journal Romance Studies. Let's try to figure out what happened.
Just in case - some brief information about the Voynich manuscript, which a reader familiar with its history can skip. The manuscript was bought by the bibliophile Wilfred Voynich in 1912. The previous owner of the manuscript was the College of Rome (present-day Pontifical Gregorian University at the Vatican). The book is 16.2 by 23.5 centimeters in size and consists of more than two hundred parchment pages. They are covered with strange drawings and even weirder text, neither language nor alphabet of which they could not determine, although they tried many times.
For a more detailed acquaintance with the history of attempts to decipher the Voynich manuscript, you can recommend an article on the Russian Wikipedia. There are many interesting things in the 2005 issue of the "Computerra" magazine, the main theme of which was this manuscript. There is a very informative English-language site. Well, the manuscript itself can also be viewed on the Internet in great detail, thanks to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where it is kept. The only firmly established fact is that the parchment of the Voynich manuscript was made between 1404 and 1438 (this is determined using radiocarbon dating).
Now for a fresh hypothesis. I must say right away that I will not give an exhaustive answer to the question asked in the title, whether the Voynich manuscript has been read. To test this would require repeating all the work that the author of the hypothesis did, as well as doing a lot that he did not do. But only reading the published article allows us to ask several perplexed questions, causing strong skepticism in relation to the general conclusion. Perhaps, when the author brings his study of the text to the end, he will be able to dispel the doubts that have arisen. But I have very little hope for that.
The author of the new hypothesis, Gerard Cheshire, earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from University College London, then a master's degree in insect ecology from the University of Bath, and finally completed his Ph. D. in human ethology from the University of Bristol. At the same university, he is now a Visiting Research Associate of a research group in evolutionary ethology. However, I could not find it among the co-authors of articles published by other members of this group. His page at Academia.edu contains only three texts related to the Voynich manuscript. Gerard Cheshire is best known as the author of popular science books. He wrote at least two dozen of them, mostly in various fields of biology, but among his works there are popular books on history and even physics.
For the first time, Gerard Cheshire presented his views on the language of the Voynich manuscript in 2017 in two articles (1, 2) published on a resource intended for linguistic preprints (that is, the texts there do not undergo any peer review). Then his hypothesis passed almost unnoticed. A negative review by Nick Pelling followed, published on his website, devoted to the Voynich manuscript and other problems of deciphering unknown scripts. But the review itself is not distinguished by a high theoretical level in the field of historical linguistics (I stopped reading at the paragraph beginning with the words And whenever I see linguistics people rap about Ur-languages …). Now, after being published in an academic journal, Gerard Cheshire has at least managed to bring his theory to the attention of a wide audience.
The new hypothesis contains two main statements. The first concerns the language of the manuscript, and the second concerns the historical figures associated with its creation. According to Cheshire, the Voynich manuscript was written in the pro-Romance language, from which the modern languages of the Romance group originated. It was written by a Dominican nun from a monastery on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples for Mary of Castile (1401-1448), wife of Alfonso V the Magnanimous (1396-1458), who united Aragon, Sicily, Sardinia, the Kingdom of Naples and the County of Barcelona under his rule. The residence of Alfonso and Maria was located in the so-called Aragonese castle on a small island near the island of Ischia.
Gerard Cheshire was helped to connect the manuscript with Alfonso V and Maria of Castile by one of the illustrations, which he interprets as a map of the Tyrrhenian Sea, and the accompanying text as a story about a volcanic eruption on February 4, 1444 and a ship sent by order of Maria of Castile to rescue local residents. An additional reason for linking the manuscript to the island of Ischia for Cheshire is the fact that the island is still famous for its thermal springs, and among the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript, you can see a whole series of images of women taking baths. Some of the women wear a crown, in which Cheshire sees Queen Mary. The bulk of the text, according to Cheshire, is a medical guide compiled for the Queen.
Promotional video:
But mainly Cheshire still relies on his identification of the language of the manuscript as pro-Romance and the reading of fragments of the text made on this basis (so far he read the captions for more than twenty illustrations, including the names of the months written next to the images of the zodiac signs). But it is precisely with the definition of language that the main skeptical question is connected.
Gerard Cheshire says: "The manuscript is written in proto-Romance-ancestral to today's Romance languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Galician." It is quite true that modern Romance languages arose from a single proto-language, which is more often referred to as "folk Latin". But even in the era of the Roman Empire, when there was no talk of the existence of any Romance languages, characteristic features already appeared in the colloquial Latin of various Roman provinces. They are visible, for example, in inscriptions made in different parts of the country. With the unity of the literary language, the spoken Latin in Gaul was somewhat different from the one that sounded in southern Italy, in Spain or in Provence.
There is, however, a theory of the unity of popular Latin until a fairly late era. It is significantly less popular among scholars, but, nevertheless, some researchers believe that the local features of the Latin language of the inscriptions are not so significant and are of a random nature, and communication within the empire was strong enough to maintain unity in the spoken language. But even supporters of this approach agree that in the 6th-7th centuries (according to an extremely late version of the assessment - in the 8th century), folk Latin disappeared as a single language, since its local variants began to differ so much that they should be considered separate Romance languages. It should be mentioned that not only the degree of difference is important, but also the emergence of a stable set of local features in the language of each of the regions.
Romance speech, originally colloquial, penetrated into the written sphere, first into business and legal, then into artistic. A developed literary tradition in Old French appeared in the 11th century, a century later it arose in Old Spanish, Provencal, several versions of Italian (in Tuscany, Umbria, Bologna and Sicily), Old Catalan. In Aragon, from the end of the 12th to the beginning of the 16th century, there was literature in the Old Aragon language, which was different from the language of Castile.
As we know, the Voynich manuscript was not created earlier than the 15th century. This is evidenced by radiocarbon dating, and Cheshire's theory of Mary of Castile corresponds to this. But the appearance of a text in the pro-Romance language in the 15th century looks unthinkable. Even if we agree with the assumptions about the long preservation of uniformity in popular Latin (in this case, the term "pro-Romance language" seems most justified), it ceased to sound several centuries before the writing of the manuscript. Assuming the use of a pro-Romance language in the 15th century is the same as, having found an encrypted 15th century manuscript originating from Moscow Russia or the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, to claim that it was written in the late Proto-Slavic language.
The language of the Voynich manuscript could be one of the variants of the Romanesque speech that existed in the 15th century. The linguistic situation of the Kingdom of Naples at that time allows for a number of options: Neapolitan dialect, Catalan, Aragonese, Tuscan, Sicilian. But in the specific phrases analyzed by Cheshire, it is not possible to see the features of any one language variant. Apparently, he understands this vulnerability, at least Cheshire tried to get advice on which of the modern Romance languages the text of the manuscript he reconstructs most resembles. But I received no answer.
Yes, and it is difficult to give such an answer, since the language turns out to be similar to all the Romance languages a little and to none in particular. The reading method used by Cheshire is rather unsophisticated. Having established the meanings of the signs of the manuscript, he reads the written words and searches for correspondences to what he read in various Romance languages from Portuguese to Romanian, as well as in Latin. The result is an unprecedented blend of Romance words that is tailored for meaningful reading.
For example, on the 77th page of the manuscript, a pipe is drawn from which something like a red cloud flies out. Gerard Cheshire reads the inscription next to the pipe as omor néna and translates "dead child", believing that the drawing depicts a miscarriage or induced abortion. He found the word omor in Romanian, where it means "to kill", the second word in Spanish niña "girl." A special piquancy of this decoding is added by the fact that the Romanian word omor is a Slavic borrowing (from umoriti), which could not be used in the language of the Kingdom of Naples in the 15th century.
Omor nena?
There is one option that could explain some of the oddities associated with the mixed nature of the Romance language (if we assume that the readings proposed are correct). The language of the manuscript could theoretically be "Mediterranean lingua franca".
Now the term "lingua franca" is called a language that serves as a means of interethnic communication in any area. But initially, behind this name was a specific, special language-pidgin, which developed in the Middle Ages in the Mediterranean and served mainly for the communication of Arab and Turkish merchants with Europeans. The Arabs called the Europeans Franks, lingua franca - "the language of the Franks." It is also known as "sabir" (from the Latin sapere - "to understand"). The lexical basis of this pidgin was Italian and Provencal, but it also contained words from Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Persian and Turkish.
Gerard Cheshire, apparently, admits this possibility, saying, “we have proto-Romance words surviving in the Mediterranean from Portugal, in the west, to Turkey, in the east. Clearly, it was a cosmopolitan lingua franca until the late Medieval period, when the political map began to inhibit meme flow, so that cultural isolation caused the modern languages to begin evolving. But these words conflict with the statement about the language of the manuscript as an ancestor language for modern Romance languages. The Mediterranean lingua franca did not in any way resemble folk Latin during the collapse of the Roman Empire. And, in any case, then one should look for correspondences to the words read in the sources, which reflect the lingua franca. There are few of them, but they exist and have been painstakingly collected by scientists.
Gerard Cheshire refers to the graphics of the Voynich manuscript as proto-Italic. It is difficult for me to understand what he means. Most likely minuscule. But the Latin minuscule was fully used even in the era of Charlemagne, and in the XIV century it was revived. Perhaps the most interesting observation of Gerard Cheshire is the similarity of some of the graphemes from the Voynich manuscript to the handwritten chronicle "On the Kingdom of Naples" (De Regno di Napoli), written by Luis de Rosa (1385-1475), who served as a steward (capo della servitù) at the court of several kings of Naples, including Alfonso the Magnanimous. But in this case, I would like the analysis of this similarity to be carried out by a specialist in Latin paleography of the 15th century.
See the original Voynich manuscript here.
MAXIM RUSSO
