Breakthrough over 600-year-old mystery manuscript [Voynich]

BBC ^ | February 18, 2014 | Nic Rigby

[Little Bill]

The Indus Valley script is probably Proto Dravidian there are still Dravidian holdouts in Afghanistan.

If I were going after the Phaistos Disk I would look at SE Anatolian scripts there seems to be some similarity.

[SunkenCiv]

:’)

[Texan5]

It is hard to explain-it is a matter of spelling phonetically in a different language because my first language-the one I speak at least 90% of the time-is English...

[SunkenCiv]

There are other agglutinative languages, and many of them appear to be isolates; Sumerian, for one example, was spoken by a people who, by their own account, came into Mesopotamia by sea, then proceeded to invent a writing system (cuneiform) which was in use until sometime in late antiquity or the early Middle Ages (and then its secrets were lost for over a thousand years), in use longer than any writing system including the Chinese script. As a people they just vanished in a demographic tide, leaving behind some of their legends, and practically no geographic placenames (they used the existing names for their cities and the rivers etc). Sumerian has been suggested as the language of the Indus scripts, but I think that has been shown to be impossible. It’s possible that it hides an ancient version of Dravidian, but it’s at least as likely that it will prove to be an otherwise unknown language that is an isolate.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2238530/posts?page=3#3

[SunkenCiv]

That’s what Barry Fell’s approach was.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.equinox-project.com/v047902.htm

[Texan5]

Thanks-fascinating subject, any way you look at it. A couple of nights ago I watched a rerun of a program about long-lost cities that have been found on H2, and the fact that nearly nothing is known about them-who the people were, where they came from/went, whether they spoke/wrote a language that is known, etc. I’d seen the program before, but it is still very interesting to me.

I’m always delighted when objects found among ruins prove to be from other areas, likely trade goods. It seems that no matter how far back you look, people always liked and wanted stuff from other places. And in order to trade, there must have been at least some common words in everyone’s language that was used in the marketplaces for such goods.