Was the Voynich manuscript written in Nahuatl?

Excerpt of the text from the Voynich Codex
 showing the odd script.

Recently a number of papers by a group of botanists from Purdue University have proposed that the enigmatic Voynich manuscript which has so far resisted decipherment was written in Nahuatl in the 16th century.

The Voynich manuscript is a codex written on 15th century vellum paper, which clearly includes botanical illustrations, but also a number of baffling illustrations that seem to be cosmological as well as maps. The pictures are accompanied by writing in a mysterious script that has been subject to multiple analyses and decipherment attempts.

In this blogpost, I give my impression of the linguistics of the proposed decipherment of the Voynich manuscript as a kind of Nahuatl.

Excerpt from the 16th century Nahuatl language
herbal Codex Badianus showing the similarity of the illustrations
(Actually, I think the Badianus has much better illustrations.)

The scholars who have advanced the proposal that the codex is written in a form of Nahuatl are Arthur Tucker and Rexford Talbert and Jules Janick. They published their 2013 proposal titled "A Preliminary Analysis of the Botany, Zoology, and Mineralogy of the Voynich Manuscript "  in HerbalGram, the Journal of the American Botanical Council. With additional material published at their institutional deposititory.

Now, in 2018, Janick and Tucker published a book titled "Unraveling the Voynich" on Springer Press, which presents the entire argument in favor of seeing the Voynich  manuscript as a Mexican codex, written largely in Nahuatl - with some Spanish and Taino mixed in.

The Codex: 

Folio 9r of the Voynich Manuscript
showing a plant with odd shaped leaves.

The codex has 240 pages, some of which are wide fold-out pages. Analysis of the parchment has shown it to be from the early 15th century, made from calf skin. Most of the contents are illustrations of plants with small texts written in an odd script. Other pages are astrological charts, populated with little nude ladies who bathe and shower in odd tubs connected with pipes.

The first known owner was Georg Baresch a 17t century alchemist in Prague. Other owners seem to have been Emperor Rudolph II, Jesuit scholar and self-proclaimed decipherer of the egyptian hieroglyphs Athanasius Kircher. When the Jesuit society decided to sell the manuscript it was bought by Lithuanian bibliophile Wilfrid Voynich after whom it is named. Today it is housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale University where it is catalogued as "Beinecke MS 408", where it has been digitized and put online for anyone to inspect (located here: https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3519597). 

All of the pages have writing in the odd script, and in spite of a host of the world's quirkiest minds working to decipher it, it has still not been read.

Here is a chart of the symbols (from Wikipedia) - the correspondence with the Latin alphabet is only to be able to name each glyph with letters from A to B:

As mentioned the mysterious manuscript has been scrutinized by many of the world's quirkiest minds - the same type of mind that would spend a career seeking to prove that Basque or Burushaski are Indo-European languages - and they have produced an amazing gamut of different proposals: From codes and ciphers, or a hoax, or shorthand Latin, or glossolalia, or an East Asian language, and now, Nahuatl.

But most of these odd proposals have not been published as presumably(?) peer-reviewed edited volumes by Springer, so the Nahuatl proposal does merit serious attention. Especially given the fact that no Nahuatl specialists have been involved in the decipherment.

The Argument for Nahuatl: 

There are three main arguments used for identifying the manuscript as written in Nahuatl:

1. The herbological part of the codex has similarities to Mexican herbological codices produced in the mid 16th century, and the botanists argue that many of the plants can be identified as new world species. And that a map of a city can be identified as "angelopolis" which they identify as the city of Puebla (de los Ángeles) in the state of Puebla. 



 The proposed tl-letter looks like the first letter in
 this word tlanequilis from 
an 18th-century Nahuatl testament.          

2. The character  which is very frequent in the manuscript, is similar to a ligature character found in some Mexican codices representing the Nahuatl consonant tl. (It also sort of looks like the way I write capital H when I write my signature, and like how many people write a double l)                        
3. The proponents argue that some of the plants can be identified by Nahuatl names, and claim that they can read some of the text in Nahuatl, using their identification of the glyphs with Nahuatl phonemes. 

I will look primarily at the third of these arguments, both because this is the actual claim to a decipherment. Arguments one and two can be true even if the language is not Nahuatl. All claims to decipherment of course rest on the degree to which they actually allow us to read the texts written in the script that they are claiming to decipher.

The main argument of the book is that the book contains elements of Nahuatl and new world flora, that it contains inspiration from the Jewish Kabbalah (which they claim was practiced among Franciscans in the New World), and that it refers to the city of Puebla de los Angeles which was founded by the Franciscan friar Toribio Benavente "Motolinia".

Nevertheless, an odd chapter by the linguist Fernando Moreira, looks at the readings and compares them with different Mesoamerican languages, finding that it doesn't really match any of them - and then proposes an undescribed Mesoamerican language which he calls "acolhuacatlatolli" (the Nahuatl word for "language of the Acolhua"). The Acolhuas were the Nahuatl-otomí ethnic group that lived in Texcoco. We know their language very well since most of what we today call "Classical Nahuatl" is in fact the Acolhua dialect of Nahuatl.  Moreira nevertheless, oddly suggests that it could have been a form of Popoloca (which is what Nahuas called all the languages they couldn't understand including at first Spanish).

So while the general argument of the book is that the language is a form of mixed Nahuatl-Spanish, the chapter by Moreira argues that it is not, and then introduces an unknown and undescribed language as a sort of deus ex machina that allows them to maintain the main parts of their hypothesis when the evidence is shown not to support it. In the rest of this blog post, I will argue based on the original proposal that it is Nahuatl or has a Nahuatl element, and not based on the alternative hypothesis that it represents an undescribed Mesoamerican language, nor the possibility that it represents a language spoken by space aliens who built the Mexican pyramids.

The Problems: 

Ok, I am already going into the problems with the proposal. The most nefarious problem is that it is pseudo-rigorous -  that is it, it works hard to give the appearance of being rigorous scholarship while in fact it is not at all.  They cite lots of serious scholarship, and mostly they cite it correctly, but nevertheless all the citations are used only for circumstantial evidence. As soon as we look at the concrete examples and the readings they are unsupported by this evidence and rests on pure speculation - often uninformed speculation.

For me the best problem, best because it is so solid that it clearly invalidates the entire endeavor, is the fact that none of the proposed readings are valid - hardly a single one of the proposed words actually read like a bona fide Nahuatl word.

Many of them are completely alien to Nahua phonological structure. And to be honest I am surprised that the scholars haven't found it to be odd that a few of the letters are so frequent that they appear in almost all words - for example more than half of the proposed plant names (and names of the nude ladies they call "nymphs") start with the letter that they read as /a/ - that would be very odd in a natural language, unless the a was a very frequent grammatical prefix (which it isn't in Nahuatl).

The readings:

Table from Janick & Tucker 2018:141

Janick and Tucker produce a full set of proposed readings for the voynichese symbols given in two tables on page 141-142. I reproduce the first part of the table here to the right (non-underlined Latin equivalents are "tentative").

Following the tradition of comparing letter frequencies in decipherment proposals, the table also supplies the frequency of each symbol in the Voynich Manuscript and the frequency of the proposed Latin equivalent in a randomly selected Nahuatl manuscript.

It is odd that the proposed readings include both signs for single phonemes as well as sings for syllables câ (we are not told what the circumflex above the â is supposed to mean? Does it represent a saltillo?) and yâ/hâ (hâ is not actually a possible Nahuatl syllable).

It also seems that Janick and Tucker fail to realize that the letter u found after c and h in classical Nahuatl texts is not actually a vowel, but represent the sound of the consonant /w/ or the lip rounding in the phoneme /kw/. This is basic stuff, and why it makes no sense to seek to make a decipherment using a language that one does not in fact understand (Champollion knew this, and that was why he spent so much time studying Coptic and other Semitic languages).

Here are some of their readings of the names of plants.

First the one that seems to be their clou: the reading of the name of a cactus-like plant as <NĀSHTLI>. They argue that this reading resembles the Nahuatl name of the fruit of the nopal cactus which is nōchtli. And sure, it does look similar to that word. The -tli ending looks like the absolutive suffix, and the root NĀSH is superficially similar to nōch-, and the reading follows Nahua phonological rules. Nevertheless, a and o are different vowels in Nahuatl, and sh (x) and ch are different consonants - so only one out of three letters in the root of the proposed reading actually match, the others are "near matches" at best.

Other readings fare a lot worse. Look for example at these images proposals:

As is known to any serious student of Nahuatl, Nahuatl does not allow consonant clusters in the beginning or end of syllables, and also does not allow clusters of more than two consonants in the middle of words. Words like ichpchi or itlmamcho or itlmaca or itlmchi are not possible words in any dialect of Nahuatl.

It seems reasonable to expect more of a decipherment than for it to produce one near match and then a load of meaningless gibberish.

Some of the syllables or even sequences of two syllables that occur frequently in their readings do have potential readings - but this is only natural given that Nahuatl has a rather small phoneme inventory and therefore not many different potential syllables. For example they note that mā means "hand" and cui means "to take" and māca means "to give" - but given how short these monsyllabic sequences are and how frequent the elements are, it is simply a coincidence. When there aren't more letters, and the letters have been assigned Nahuatl equivalents, some sequences in the reading are bound to look like some sequences in the vast vocabulary of Nahuatl. 

The chance of random matches gets even worse when they admit the possibility of readings in Spanish and Taino and of weird mixtures of the two (unlike anything found in any colonial Document). Why for example, would a Nahua or Nahuatl speaker,  given that Nahuas were expert cultivators of agave, use the Taino word for agave "maguey" (in the mangled spelling <MAHUEOI>) and not the Nahuatl word metl?  

A Test: 

The best way to assess a proposed decipherment is of course by testing it on a piece of text and see what it produces, and if it is intelligible.

I tried such a test on a piece of text from the top of folio 28v, and below is the result. It is utterly unintelligible, it has only the vaguest resemblance to Nahuatl - and that is only because of the strong association between the /TL/ phoneme and Nahuatl. The phonology is alien to Nahuatl, allowing for example consonant clusters in the beginning and end of words, and failing to respect the Nahua phonological rules of assimilation. Nahuatl is of course a language that has few phonemes and a lot of a's and a lot of tl's and cu's and hu's and so does this proposed reading - but that is only because the decipherers on purpose have assigned those readings to the most frequent letters. Furthermore these letters are twice as frequent in this "language"  than they are in Nahuatl according to their own count - for example Nahuatl only has the frequency 4,7% for tl, whereas the Voynich has the frequency 10%. So what we get is a text that superficially looks like Nahuatl, but only to someone who doesn't actually know any Nahuatl.

Nevertheless, anyone who knows any dialect of Nahuatl will be able to see that the below is not Nahuatl, and that only certain words resemble Nahuatl because they have the sounds and endings that are frequent in nahuatl such as -tli and -câ (why do the decipherers add the ^ symbol above the a in the câ letter? They never explain what it is supposed to represent).

Following the proposed decipherment this text reads:
TLMCÂ CUAALL MAE  HUMOLL  MAHUMI CUATLI CHIMAEI
ITLMACÂI CUATLO MICHI CUATLMAE MAE TLMI CUATLMAECHI MAEA
MAE MACÂ MI MALL

Could it be Nahuatl or inspired by Nahuatl?

The language of the proposed reading clearly is not Nahuatl. It has only the most superficial structural resemblance to Nahuatl,  even if we were to admit the possibility of undescribed dialects. When we decide to read the most frequent signs of the script as their most frequent Nahuatl counterparts the text naturally comes to resemble Nahuatl. But since it violates the phonological rules expected of Nahuatl, and is entirely void of any recognizable grammatical structure from Nahuatl (we can't even see differences between verbs and nouns, much less actual grammatical morphology) this can safely be discarded.

A further argument against the plausibility of the background story of the proposal is historical: In mid-16th century Mexico anyone who would be able to produce a codex would also have been able to write it in proper Nahuatl - even Spanish friars (this was a requirement for being a priest in Mexico at this time). So, OK maybe they would want to invent a new script so that nobody could read what they had written about all those little naked ladies - but one would of course assume that they would then write intelligible Nahuatl. Otherwise why bother?

The Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, also known as the Codex Badianus is an actual herbal manuscript which is known to have been written by Nahua scholar Martin de la Cruz in 1552 and later translated into Latin by another Nahua scholar, Juan Badiano. Nahua people in the 16th century were not only able to write intelligible Nahuatl, they were also able to translate it into Latin. And to boot the illustrations are much better, and allows easy identification of the different species - the Voynich plant drawings come across as crude by comparison. 

Finally, as I read the example it bothered me that there is a certain repetitiveness in the deciphered text, the same letters seem to occur very frequently in combinations with specific other letters. This is not usually the case for natural languages - but very frequent in something like glossolalia of the baby-speech "lalala balala malalaba"- type.

Some of the little naked ladies, these ones from folio 80r. 

Bibliography:

• Janick, J., & Tucker, A. O. (2018). Unraveling the Voynich Codex. Springer.

Quetzalcoatl: Precious Twin?

It is commonly asserted that a possible meaning of the name of the deity Quetzalcoatl is "precious twin". Sometimes it is even claimed that this is the real meaning and that the more commonly given meaning "Feathered Serpent" is false. In this blogpost I take a look at the history of this claim and its validity.

The claim is found in many different places: 

Historian Enrique Florescano states in his 2002 "The Myth of Quetzalcoatl" that "Uniting into one single entity the attributes of the serpent and the bird, metaphorically combining both the germinating powers of the earth and the creative powers of the sky, the Plumed Serpent became synonymous with the Precious Twin" (p. 147) 

Nahuatl translator John Bierhorst states in his 1974 "Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature" takes it as an example of the multifaceted meanings of Nahuatl metaphors: "The name Quetzalcoatl means literally "plumed serpent" from quetzalli, feather of the precious green quetzal, and coatl , a snake". ... A particularly ingenious reinterpretation, involving a double pun, transforms "bird-snake" into "precious twin", an epithet of the morning star considered the twin of the evening star (quetzal = "quetzal" or "precious", coatl = "snake" or "twin")" (p. 4)

The idea is not new either, in 1908 anthropologist H. Beyer published an article about the "symbolic meaning of the dog in ancient Mexico" in which he stated that  "Xolotl is the twin-brother of Quetzalcoatl, and vice versa. Therefore Xolotl became the 'god of the twins', and Quetzalcoatl’s name can be translated not only as 'plumed serpent' but also as 'precious twin'.”

And in the more extreme form denying the meaning "plumed serpent" it is found in discussion fora on the internet:  "Another lie. Quetzalcoatl was not white, he made no prophecy, he didn’t promise to return, and his name does not mean ‘feathered serpent.’ The name means ‘precious twin’. The myth that Quetzalcoalt promised to return is a total fabrication--a post-conquest myth contrived by Spanish missionaries to facilitate their conversion of Indians." (2012 discussion forum)

So lets look a bit at what the evidence for this secondary meaning actually is.

Everyone agrees that the name Quetzalcoatl is composed of two roots quetzalli /ketzal-li/ and coatl /ko:wa-tl/.  What is less clear is what exactly the meanings of those two words are.

Related to the verb quetza /ketza/ "to stand/put upright", the meaning of the word quetzalli is given by Molina as "pluma rica, larga y verde" (Long, green, rich feather). The relation probably refers to the way that feathers stand up from the skin of the bird. In the Florentine Codex we find sentences such as "in quetzalli īhuān in nepapan tlazohihhuitl " (the quetzalli and the other precious feathers),  or the description of the feather seller at the market "quināmaca in quetzalli in chīlchōtic, in tzicoliuhqui, in pilihhuitl"  (he sells the quetzalli, the chili-green-colored, the curved, the young feathers) and "ca ixachi inin tōtōtl īquetzallo" (they are huge that bird's feathers) (I have the examples from the Florentine from Wimmer's dictionary under the entry "quetzalli"). This should show adequately that the meaning is primarily related to a particular kind of long green feather which is highly valuable for decorative purposes.  According to Sahagun the metaphorical usages of the word quetzalli were as a reference to an unborn child, and as a form of address when addressing the Tlatoani "Quetzallé!". This does suggest that it was used to express feelings of deep appreciation similar to calling somone "my treasure" or "my jewel". However I have found no examples of usages of "quetzalli" as modifier with the meaning "precious". In compounds it always seems to refer directly to the quetzal feather itself , e.g. quetzalcomitl "a recipient for holding feathers" or quetzalcopilli "feathered headdress" (one possible exception is the word quetzalitztli, describing a kind of precious stone, but I wonder if we can assume that quetzal- necessarily means "precious" in the Nahuatl word, it might well refer to some other property of the stone, perhaps a green color - or to the original literal meaning of quetzalli as "something that stands upright"). 

The word coatl /ko:wa:tl/ (with the plural form cocoua /ko:ko:waʔ/) however clearly has two meanings, "snake" and "twin". Molina gives it in several instances both in the Spanish and Nahuatl parts of his vocabulario: 
- Geminos,hermanos nacidos de vn vientre. - Cocoua.

- Mellizo - coatl

- Cocoa - culebras o mellizos.

- Coatl.- culebra,mellizo,o lombriz del estomago
The usage of "twin" lives on in Mexican Spanish as cuate "twin/close friend".

So half the translation holds, Quetzalcoatl could be translated as "feather twin", which would not be weird given the fact that he is described as being the twin of the dog-deity xolotl, and that he was related to the planet venus which was considered a twin-star with different twins appearing in the evening and the morning.

But where does the "precious" aspect come into play? How and when was it suggested that the word for "precious feather" could be used to mean simply "precious".

Here we have to go even further back in the literature. 

Jacques Lafaye in his "Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe" points us to a manuscript called El Fénix de Occidente: Santo Tomas descubierto con el nombre de Quetzalcoatl written by the Jesuit Manuel Duarte in the second half of the 17th century (Lafaye argues that it was not written by Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora to whom the text is usually attributed).  In this manuscript Duarte was determined to demonstrate that the native people of New Spain were not strangers to the Christian Gospel. Many friars had a hard time believing that God could have left an entire hemisphere devoid of his word for 1500 years, and they looked for signs to suggest that  they had in fact been subject to evangelization which they had then subsequently forgotten.

Duarte was convinced that Saint Thomas the apostle, who was known to have preached in India, had also reached the West Indies, and converted the natives to Christianity and he looked for all the evidence that he could find for this thesis. In the myths of Quetzalcoatl he found exactly what he was looking for. The idea that Quetzalcoatl was in fact St. Thomas had already circulated among the Franciscans and Dominicans (e.g. Diego Durán)  as a quiet heresy, but Duarte made it explicit. He argued that apart from the ways that the figure of Quetzalcoatl as bringer of knowledge and light, and his relations to the human prince called Topiltzin suggested that the myth had its origin in the figure of of a religious man, the very name of Quetzalcoatl was indeed the same as St. Thomas. He derived the name Thomas from the Greek form of the Aramaic name תָּאוֹמָא (Ta'oma') which means "twin", corresponding also to the greek didymus "twin".  Here was a clear correspondence between the two! But what about the Quetzal part? What did that respond to?  It seems that Duarte in his eagerness to make the two parts fit, considered quetzalli with its connotations of appreciation and value corresponded to the title "Santo" (Saint/Holy). Quite a stretch when you think about it. 

The idea of Quetzalcoatl being a European Christian missionary is also found in the work of Bartolomé de las Casas, who nonetheless does not give the translation "precious twin" or suggest that it wa specifically St. Thomas. Rather Las Casas states that Quetzalcoatl refers to a certain kind of snake which has a feather on top of its head, and which is mostly found in the tropical province of Xicalango.

So no, Quetzalcoatl, cannot and does not translate to "precious twin", 

The idea behind this translation can be traced back to the millenarian heresy of the Franciscans (which is also the origin of the erroneous ideas that Quetzalcoatl was blonde, and that he promised to return and that the Aztecs thought that Cortés was the returning Quetzalcoatl/St. Thomas). It is extremely unlikely that any native Nahuatl speaker in the 16th or 17th century would have considered Duarte's etymology to make any sense. They might have accepted the idea of coatl as a double entendre connoting subtly his status as a twin, but it is unlikely that they would ever consider quetzalli to mean anything other than "precious green feather". So indeed they must have thought of the deity Quetzalcoatl as being characterized by plumage, and to have the dual aspect of a twin and a snake. 

Thus it is not surprising to look at the way Quetzalcoatl was depicted in the codices, either as a snake or a man, but in both cases decorated by long, rich green feathers.

[Thanks to the readers of the Nahuat-l listserv 

who responded to a query of mine regarding this issue, 

and pointed me on the way towards the facts. 
I have also made some corrections in 
response to comments from the list.]

Quetzalcoatl as Snake in Codex Telleriano Remensis

Quetzalcoatl as human in Codex Telleriano Remensis