There is a tiny linguistic gem northeast of the Veneto—an alpine village nestled near an important mountain pass. The inhabitants speak Tischlbong, a language related to Carinthian, a south-Bavarian dialect spoken by Slovenes who inhabit the mountains of the southern Tyrol and parts of the Slovenian Styria. As a distinct dialect, Carinthian dates back to about the end of the 13th century.
![[Pic of Timau village, Italy]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TimauItaly.png)
Timau by Mikmaq, Wikipedia
It is the older people who are fluent in Tischlbong, a medieval dialect shared with Slovenian residents of the Tyrol. A similar situation exists in Lombardy—the Lombardic language is mostly spoken by the elders, with the younger generation moving over to Italian.
Talking Tischlbong
At first the Tischlbong language seems odd, but if you switch your brain to German and note the patterns, after a while it makes sense. Substitute “b” for “w”, sometimes “p” for “b”, and drop some of the endings and doubled letters, and one gets words like
- is da (ist die/is the); af (auf/of)
- Otobar (Oktober/October)
- ausar (her ausser/but for)
- varlosen (verlassen/leave)
which has some commonalities with Voynichese in its simplicity and emphasis on vowel forms.
Tischlbong caught my attention not only because of its unique characteristics of dropping characters and compressing words, but because the larger Carinthian-speaking population has multicultural connections to Graz, the Veneto, and Slovenia. Historically, the principality of Carantani extended as far as Salzburg, on the German border. Forerunners to the language may also have been spoken in Swabia.
![[Map detail Friulian language]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/FriulianMap.png)
Klenje, Wikimedia Commons
As examples, we see bon viaç (French bon voyage) for good journey, buine sere (Spanish/Italian) for good evening, and cràmar (from MH German Kramaere) for pedlar or haberdasher.
Records of these languages and villages begin to emerge in the middle medieval period, early enough to precede the Voynich Manuscript.
There are several places where combinations of languages happened naturally. One I’ve mentioned several times is the Burgundian corridor bordering Italy, Provençe, and Switzerland. I’ve also blogged about blended Latin and German, but wanted to include the eastern side of Lombardy, southern Tyrol, and the Veneto, as well, and to mention Tischlbong and Friulian (and their sister dialects) in the context of blended languages.
Summary
The text on folio 116v of the Voynich Manuscript is somewhat Germanic on the top line, Romance on the second line (at least in structure and the balance of vowel sounds), Latin on the third line, and Voynichese and Germanic on the fourth line. If a resident in one of the borderland villages of mixed Germanic/Romance origin were writing something for his or her convenience, it might come out in a similar way.
As for the main text, it is very concise and sparse and, in some ways, reminded me of Tischlbong. I’m not assuming the VMS is natural language, but I do think it came from the mind of someone who liked to focus on what was important and who did not include a lot of unnecessary “extras”, and many Tischlbong words, when compared to their German analogs, defy convention and include only what is necessary to understand them and no more.
J.K. Petersen
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Hi JKP,
I understand why you find this language interesting, considering the properties you describe.
However, there are literally dozens of languages and pidgins in that region (alpine valleys, Trentino-Alto Adige, etc) which exhibit all the same properties, compressing, mixing latin with german, italian with german, etc. Why focus on Tischlbong?
Also it is unclear to me: are you suggesting Tischlbong for 116v or the whole Voynich Manuscript?
I don’t know if the person who wrote the marginalia was involved with the development of the manuscript. I do think that he or she lived close in time to the creation of the VMS, based on paleographic characteristics. Consider that the VMS text itself has certain commonalities with the Tischlbong language (note the word for October in Tischlbong and the MANY tokens in the VMS zodiac section that almost say “otobar” without too much squinting or manipulation)—in other words, the vowel-consonant balance is very similar (I don’t know if VMS vowels are actually vowels, but the way tokens are put together is similar in rhythm if one reads them as vowels).
I am not explicitly trying to say it’s Tischlbong, however, for the very reason you mentioned… there are many small pockets in this area and on the other side of Lombardy that have these characteristics, but since I mostly talk about the ones near Switzerland/Provençe, I wanted to include at least one from the Veneto region. We don’t know how many blended languages died out between 1400 and the present.
I don’t even know if the VMS is natural language. Based on one-to-one substitution I’m quite sure it is not, but there are other forms of substitution and other ways of encoding information, so it remains an open question.
I have had a number of people criticize me for suggesting the final page is polyglot, so I wanted to post some examples of languages that are inherently polyglot, hence the previous blog on macaronic, and also this blog, to demonstrate that there are languages that naturally mix German and Latin, and also German and Romance languages, and that they exist even today.
IF the VMS is natural language and IF the designer is from the same region as the marginalia writer (a bigger “if”) then MAYBE the VMS also represents a blended language or perhaps an effort to resolve two languages into one (inventing universal languages was the rage in the 16th century, but it’s not certain if people were doing this in the early 15th century). If it is a blended language (especially disparate languages like German and Romance), then statistical studies that focus on individual languages may not provide useful information.
Hi JKP,
I agree with much of what you’ve written here, and certainly with the impression that there is more to it than one-to-one substitution.
I especially think that this: ” If it is a blended language (especially disparate languages like German and Romance), then statistical studies that focus on individual languages may not provide useful information” is true, not just for intentionally blended languages but also for such pidgins and micro-languages such as the alpine valley ones.
The difficulty, of course, is finding a text in those languages that would be long enough for us to make those kinds of statistical studies.
I ran into this exact problem at a time when I was looking into the 13thC miners’ pidgin from Trentino. Just for comparison, I’ll copy-paste something about it I added to a forum thread about two years ago so you see why I found it interesting:
“They are German words with the addition of Latin grammatical endings… a fact which sometimes makes them very difficult to understand…
Werchi = gewerke (shareholder)
Silbrarii = silbererzbergmann (silverminer)
Wassar = wascher (ore washer)
Smellzer = schmelzer (smelter)
Gestaldio = verwalter (administrator, steward)
Xencator = senker, schachtabeufer (man sinking a shaft)
Dorslagus = durschlag (cross cut)
Xurfus = schurf (cut, trench)
Carregi or Carowego = karrenweg, forderstrecke (main drift for cart)
Sega = sage (saw)
Arcentaria = erzbergwerk (metal mine)
Xafetum = Schacht (shaft)
Rota = rad, pochwerk (grinding mill with water wheel)”
It really is a shame that this, like so many of the rarer alpine linguistic gems, have disappeared over time.
Very interesting examples.