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.
If it is Nahuatl, it should be possible to decipher a lot of it pretty quickly. Nahuatl has very regular morphology which will give repeating patterns that can be used to decipher the letter, assuming they're phonetic. For instance most nouns end in -tl so we should see many of the words in the manuscript ending in a symbol or two symbols which we can assume is tl.
I am also interested to see what comes of this, but it's been pointed out that is paper is somewhat suspect with seemingly little input from Nahuatl language experts or prior literature on the Voynich manuscript.
In it, he explains the prevalence of half-baked origin theories as a function of several psychological and probabilistic phenomena:
* Pareidolia
* Confirmation bias
* The birthday problem
This is an interesting discussion, as it provides a generalized and broadly applicable framework for why we often see things where they don't indeed exist.
I believe that presumes it's a traditional phonetic alphabet. I'm not a linguist by any measure, but the inventiveness I have seen in human languages gives me hope here.
But let's assume this is an elaborate hoax by a masterful con-artist. Are you really claiming that someone spent so long crafting such a forgery, with nothing before or after - like some black dahlia of literature?
> Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages. For instance, the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts.
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.