The Voynich Ninja

Book pahlavi had 12 or 13 letters, and they managed (poorly). =P What's another few letters merged..

I have a theory that I haven’t tested yet. Maybe some words are written in reverse, and some glyphs such as “dy” or “daiin” works like uno reverse cards. I will look into it

(16-11-2024, 03:46 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

zamolxe Wrote:About the alphabet. An 24 letter alphabet can be written using 13 signs, 12 letters and one "joker"/shifter. If the joker is attached to a letter, it will change/shift it to another letter (second meaning). So the alphabet will be represented both by single signs and bigrams.

That's a special case of a verbose cipher, a scenario that is often considered. An implication is that Voynichese spaces cannot be trusted, because Voynich words are not longer than plain-text words.

It doesn't need to be a cipher. Hiragana and katakana, sure, are not alphabets, but they have two shifters - the dakuten, which voices the consonants, and the handakuten which turns h or f into p (and k into ng / ŋ in the transcription of some dialects which turn intervocalic -g- into -ŋ-). There's no reason why something similar couldn't be applied to an alphabet, so bcdfghjklmnpqrstvxz which is itself really two sounds less at least in Latin because c, k, and q represent the same sound in different context, so we already get bcdfghjlmnprstvxz, and with a voicing marker, we can in turn turn that into cfhjlmnprstx + voicing marker, yielding only 12 consonant signs.

Now, a language with the consonant inventory of Medieval Japanese would have f m n r s t y w - only eight consonants, nine if also counting N, ie. syllabic n, and five vowels - a i u e o. Vowel length, phonetic in Japanese, can also been marked with a diactiric, see eg. the Latin apex, which marked exactly vowel length, which happens to also be phonetic in Latin. So Medieval Japanese, for example, would easily be written with only fourteen letters and two diactritics, with the caveat, that y and w could themselves be written as diacritics, see eg. how palatalized e in Czech is written ě.

In addition, double / long consonants can also be written as diacritics or abbreviated, hence how Spanish ñ originated from nn.