Or, that is, it’s just called “Latin” and it’s already the most exhaustively documented language in the history of the world
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I’m sure I have no idea. A different guy who claimed to have decoded it a couple years ago was angling for a TV show, but I don’t know enough about linguistics or whatever Cheshire’s field of study is to guess what he has to gain by making this particular claim. It seems perhaps relevant that he’s only saying he knows how to decode it, but hasn’t actually done so; maybe this is just a teaser, and he’ll need a grant or some other source of funding to actually translate the whole thing?
What piqued my interest in this story was mostly the language he used to describe his accomplishment. I am not qualified in the slightest to judge the technical merits (or lack thereof) of his actual arguments – in fact, I can’t even understand them. But that just makes the hyperbolic subtext of his words stand out even more for me, and he frankly sounds like some flavor of narcissist (please note that I am not qualified to make psychological diagnoses, either, natch).
I mean, not only was this problem “triply difficult”, it also contained an added “fourth dimension of difficulty” (emphasis mine). Also, this alphabet contains not only dipthongs, but “triphthongs, quadriphthongs and even quintiphthongs.”
You guys. Quintiphthongs!
I have no idea of the relative frequencies of various thongs in medieval languages, but surely five thongs represent a much harder task to decipher than a measly two thongs. No wonder it was “quite impossible for anyone to even begin to fathom the meaning” of the text. Luckily, Cheshire was on the case with an “innovative and independent technique of thought experiment” to figure it all out for the rest of us. 
Admittedly, it’s entirely possible that I’m being way too snarky in my assessment of his claims (and honestly, I don’t know why I’m so salty, of late), but I feel like bullshit sounds the same in pretty much any language, whether you understand it, or not.
re: the Voynich MS itself, this is my favorite theory put forth in the comments on the Ars Technica post:
I view the Voynich Manuscript as a 15th century version of TimeCube, and one of the reasons it has resisted translation is that it was written by a crazy person.
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…including the various dialects of Vulgar Latin, which was the koiné of its time. That was more or less my point. Latin was the stem language. There was no lost Italic language that served as a koiné throughout the Empire in parallel with Latin. (As far as I know, Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan and the lesser Italic languages were pretty much absorbed into Latin around the beginning of the Principate. There was, however, a P/Q divide similar to the Celtic languages, and most of the other Italic languages were on the P side, whereas Latin, Faliscan (spoken just North of Rome, and probably mutually intelligible with Latin) and the Romance languages are the Q side.)
Part of the reason that I consider this a con, other than the extreme unlikeliness of a “proto-Romance” koiné passing us by completely unknown and unattested, is that the vowel frequencies and distributions he’s claiming are nowhere to be found in Italic languages, let alone the Romance subfamily. Triphthongs are possible in the early languages, but 4 or 5 vowels strung together? On a regular basis? Oy!
If I had to guess, this would be my guess as well. I’ve known, umm… manuscript writers with a tenuous grasp of reality. They pay an incredible amount of attention to format, but the contents, while looking like they should make sense, prove to be batshit crazy.
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Shouldn’t those be tetraphthongs and pentaphthongs? Maybe there is some standard I don’t know, but otherwise you’d think researchers on Latin and its hypothetical proto-Romance form would care that phthongos, di-, and mono- are all Greek.
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Could you imagine pentaphthongs? “Could you pass the maeiou, please?”
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The proper fate of maeiounaeise is creamy unpronounceability.
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Car ownership, population density, and wealth.
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That’s why you gotta nuke it from orbit.
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Those ants that were bothering me last year? Boiling water. Down the hole.
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Seemed like kind of a long-winded way of saying that unless you live in NYC, not having a car is just one more thing that sucks about being poor, but I think it’s a fair point that’s worth repeating.
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NYC, or just anywhere without decent public transit and bicycle infrastructure.
ETA: I wonder what would happen if a programme was started to give people in poorer areas bicycles (and safe bike lanes were instituted).
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I expect a crackdown on bike riders would follow.
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Yep. I live in a small town and ride on the street. I go the speed limit, and people still scream at me out of their cars.
I mostly walk now.
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That’s why I mentioned the safe bike lanes part.
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Yeah, but that’s pretty much everywhere else, isn’t it? I’m not trying to be snarky, here; as far as I can tell I think that’s genuinely the case? The article calls out New York as being “unique” and an outlier in a couple places, so that was the source of my original comment.
Personally, I’ve never lived anywhere that had either decent public transit or bicycle infrastructure, so I’m sure it’s at least partly a failure of imagination on my part to really grok how people get by in places where it’s more trouble than it’s worth to have a car. I mean, I understand that they do it, but it still seems like merely “getting by” to me, i.e. it’s a clearly inferior situation that they just have to live with.
I have occasionally visited such places, but I don’t think that’s a good proxy for living there, and even then it seems like the main difference in practical terms is that you basically walk everywhere all the time. (not that my lazy ass couldn’t benefit from more walking about, but still. 
)
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It seems like if you didn’t get your public transportation in place before the First World War, it isn’t going to happen.
For example:
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I live somewhere that’s sort of in between.
Today I walked to the farmers market, had a latte at a café/comic shop, waiting for another shop to open, went to the shop, went to my local grocer’s, walked home – and was never more than 2km from home. Using a car would have been far less convenient.
Tomorrow I’m going downtown, and I’m going to take public transit for the same reasons. Parking for where I’m going would probably cost twice as much as I’m planning on spending on lunch.
But for work, I have to commute 37km to the burbs. It can be done by public transit, but it requires taking two buses and a long subway ride. So I drive, and I’ve learned to adjust my schedule to make it as non-painful as possible.
When I worked downtown, I took public transit or rode my bike – 10km each way. I could take bike paths nearly all the way to work, so except for the last kilometre it was very safe. I had a car already, but again, it would have been expensive and inconvenient to drive. A work colleague who drove used to drive me home after work because we lived in the same neighbourhood, and although I accepted because I liked her and didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but it was agony just being a passenger – all the collective road rage building up in the drivers as they inched along.
So yeah, taking a car around here is not very smart, but they’re handy if you need to go more than about 20km.
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