Interesting. I'm not really convinced, though, since A) they match individual letters to more than one letter in a way that a lot will be left to be resolved by context and B) if it was a Turkic language, there would presumably be longer words.
As for A, that was the case with Ottoman Turkish so it's definitely not an argument to debunk the theory, just something that I thought was weird about the claims in the video: it couldn't be a "phonemic alphabet" if eg. /o/ and /ø/ are represented by the same letter. That was the problem with Ottoman Turkish using the Arabic script, and why Uyghur etc. use additional letters; the vowels are just that important. Especially since the Voynich Manuscript predates Ottoman Turkish and is contemporary with Old Anatolian Turkish, which AFAIK did write all vowels with different diacritics, it wouldn't make sense for the author to have chosen to use the same letter for /o/ and /ø/, etc. instead of having separate letters for them, especially if they had different letters from /u/ and /y/; if there was a one-to-one correspondence between the Arabic script used to write Old Anatolian Turkish (or another Turkic alphabet) and the Voynich Manuscript, it'd make more sense, but there clearly isn't and they're not suggesting that there is, so... why would the vowels be written the way they are? And why call it a "phonemic alphabet" if it isn't?
B, on the other hand, seems like an even bigger obstacle. Turkish words (and words in other Turkic languages) can get fairly long, but AFAICT the longest words in the Voynich Manuscript are around nine letters; there probably are longer ones, but I'd expect a lot more of them and even longer ones. I mean, even three-letter words like
ata ("father") can be easily inflected until they're thirteen letters:
atalarımızdan ("from our fathers"), so naturally longer words would be much longer when inflected. Are they claiming that only short words were used in the entire book or something?
I guess it could be a Turkic-based creole where possessive suffixes and whatnot have been lost and where short simple words were the norm, but...
Terra wrote:They never explain why they can translate only 30% though. Perhaps they just haven't had time to do every page yet? In the comments he mentions that the author was multilingual, so perhaps they don't know some words because they're Arabic/Greek/Other?
It seems kinda suspicious tbh, especially since in the comments he's refusing to give actual transcriptions of more than individual words and hinting at one of the commenters "getting close" and whatnot. Just seems like the kind of behaviour an ARGer or trolly conlanger or even an outright scammer would have, since they do give an English translation of one page in the video so it can't really be about wanting to protect their work before it's published and recognised... if I could be arsed, I'd try to back-translate their English translation of that page into Turkish, but I'd have to look up every other word since my Turkish is nowhere near good and that'd be too much effort for the relaxed mood I'm in right now.
If it clearly has a lot of Turkic words and influence but it doesn't
really make sense as a Turkic language, something to consider could be whether it's Cappadocian Greek or something.
Terra wrote:If you want mystery, we still have the Codex Seraphinianus.
But that was just some dude's art project in the eighties or something, right?