Very interesting examples.

It really is a shame that this, like so many of the rarer alpine linguistic gems, have disappeared over time.

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.