Editing Voynich manuscript (section)

=== Constructed language ===
{{See also|Philosophical language}}
The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript words led [[William F. Friedman]] to conjecture that the text could be a [[constructed language]]. In 1950, Friedman asked the British army officer [[John Tiltman]] to analyse a few pages of the text, but Tiltman did not share this conclusion. In a paper in 1967, Brigadier Tiltman said:
{{blockquote|After reading my report, Mr.&nbsp;Friedman disclosed to me his belief that the basis of the script was a very primitive form of synthetic [[universal language]] such as was developed in the form of a philosophical classification of ideas by [[John Wilkins|Bishop Wilkins]] in 1667 and [[George Dalgarno|Dalgarno]] a little later. It was clear that the productions of these two men were much too systematic, and anything of the kind would have been almost instantly recognisable. My analysis seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution.<ref name=Tiltman-1967>{{cite journal |last=Tiltman |first=John H. |date=Summer 1967 |title=The Voynich manuscript: The most mysterious manuscript in the world |journal=NSA Technical Journal |volume=XII |issue=3 |publisher=U.S. [[National Security Agency]] |url=http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/Voynich_Manuscript_Mysterious.pdf |access-date=June 8, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111018025101/https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/Voynich_Manuscript_Mysterious.pdf |archive-date=October 18, 2011}}</ref>}}

The concept of a constructed language is quite old, as attested by [[John Wilkins]]'s ''[[An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language|Philosophical Language]]'' (1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of the Voynich manuscript by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding [[suffix]]es ([[fusional language]]s); as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes—for example, all plant names would begin with similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitive nature of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript.<ref name="plan">{{harvnb|Kahn|1967|pp=870–871}}</ref>