The Voynich Ninja

(21-04-2026, 12:43 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As a Parisian (born there, lived there, now I'm in the suburbs), I see what you mean, but...

"juin" is either \ʒɥɛ̃\ or \ʒy.ɛ̃\
"join" is \ʒwɛ̃\

Those were my best attempts at writing what I heard on the wiktionary page, i'm not great at knowing which IPA symbols to use.. if it helps, my "oo-uh" was an attempt to represent exactly what you just put.   

To my ear though, all of those sound basically the same. What do you think about the Vosges one? 

(21-04-2026, 12:16 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree though, that if this is an occasional misspelling, it might be valuable for us to also track the most likely standard form.

What stops me from doing this, is that the sequence as a whole is nonstandard. Once you start allowing that yong = jong = joing =... , you might do the same for different month names as well. Maybe "augst" is a misspelling of "august" and so on...

I agree, it's problematic to just say they are equivalent. It may be, however, quite useful to more agressively search out joing and juing in various areas to see what can be found, including mistakes.

(21-04-2026, 02:26 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What do you think about the Vosges one? 

Sounds just like "join", \ʒwɛ̃\, also in Switzerland, Belgium according to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

(21-04-2026, 12:16 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What stops me from doing this, is that the sequence as a whole is nonstandard. Once you start allowing that yong = jong = joing =... , you might do the same for different month names as well. Maybe "augst" is a misspelling of "august" and so on...

Isn't y=i=j a safe -ish assumption here? As you said, in some Romance languages y and i are sometimes interchangeable (may, mai). I can picture yong/yollet and iong/iollet being two valid spellings of the same word (same pronunciation), with the stylistic preference of elongating i into j in word-boundary positions if space allows it. A scribe could have the liberty of choosing between the so-called "greek i" (y) and "latin i" (i, j) as they please, both characters sharing same phonetic values.

I agree about the interchangeability of i/j/y in such cases. But as far as I can see, the scoring take this into account already. (Do let me know if I missed something).

Hell yea it does    Forget I said anything. Keep up the good work 

(21-04-2026, 09:52 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree about the interchangeability of i/j/y in such cases. But as far as I can see, the scoring take this into account already. (Do let me know if I missed something).

I don't think the scoring should be changed for i/j/y. This being said, I don't think I have seen a single usage of "y" for either June or July in any language or time period i've seen so far. Even in manuscripts that use y frequently, june and july are always j/i. 

I'll have a search and see if there are any. Maybe the y is a bigger hint than the "ong". 

(it is a y right? It does lack the curved tail found in the y in both mays)
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I can only see it as "y" - the difference in descender may be due to the position in the word. Also, I'm having trouble thinking of any alternative.
The month names originated from Latin, where Iūnius starts with a soft /j/ as in Dutch and German "ja". The sound of this initial "i" shifts to a harder "dj" or "dzj" or "zj" in French and English, but it's still one vowel consonant sound that's represented by "i" or "j". 

(By the way, there are certainly cases where we transcribed a capital "I" as "J" instead, but I don't think the difference is relevant You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ) 

Now there's something we might be missing. Let's call /j/ as in Dutch and German a "soft j" and the English and French variants "hard j". If I understand correctly, both "iong" and "jong" would be pronounced with a hard-j in medieval French. What about "yong" though? Wouldn't that be a soft-j?

In other words, does the "yong" spelling betray that the marginalia writer pronounced these months with /j/ instead of /dʒ/?

Yes, I <-> J interchangibility is frequent and i've been considering them to be an identical spelling. There are so many instances of both being used by the same scribe for the same words that considering them seperate letters is basically wrong for many centuries. 

But this is what I was digging at. At the beginning of words Y makes more sense for replacing I/J  when used as a consonant, like in dutch and german, but dutch and german continued using I/J as a consonant, not Y. English began using Y, in words such as "Yong" which turned into Young. I don't know if Y ever made a ʒ or dʒ sound. 

What about "ij" at the beginning of words? Was that ever trialed by some folk at scale? Where the i makes a vowel sound, and the j is the consonant, (sort of) like in Partijen or Rijen. 

Maij is a spelling I have seen, but ijuni or ijuli aren't something i've come across. I've only ever seen ij be used as it is today, with the sound of english "eye" or dutch "ei". 

You do have ijs, ijzer in dutch.

In Dutch, "ij" was originally just double i, so a long /i:/ sound (as in English "see"). 

This becomes clear when you compare to English: Dutch "hij" corresponds to English "he". Both used to have a long /i/, but in Dutch this sound changed into a diphthong, merging with the already existing diphthong "ei". This is why in modern Dutch, you have to learn by heart which words are spelled with ij and ei (they sound the same).

To get to the point, "ij" cannot be relevant at the start of "yong", because that would turn the initial consonant sound /j/ into a long vowel sound, like "eeong" in English. That's a bit much...

Therefore, the only option I see is to read this as "yong".

I wonder though, if the sound of consonant "i" in French "iuin" and "iollet" had hardened, then isn't the same true for word-initial y?

Exactly my thoughts. Even though modern day French (and Picard) seem to pronounce word-initial y exclusively with the "soft" /j/ sound whereas word-initial j with "harder" /ʒ/ (resp. /d͡ʒ/) sounds, I think it's certainly plausible for some medieval scribes to have abused the y=i interchangeability, extending it to word-initial positions as well, especially back then when orthography was far from standardized. Thus, /ʒɔ'lɛt/  /d͡ʒol'lɛt/ (or some variation in-between) could have been rendered iollet jollet or yollet, all three pronounced the same, unlike nowadays where yollet would definitely be read with a /j/ sound

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As an anecdotal sidenote, it's not unheard of of romance languages evolving different y consonant sounds. Even after having merged /y/ sounds into /i/ or /j/, Argentinian and Uruguayan Spanish accent have coincidentally evolved a /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ consonant sound for y while still keeping the /i/ and /ʝ/ (~ /j/) vowel sound. For instance, "yo soy" is pronounced  /ʝo soi/ in most Spanish-speaking regions. Standard Argentinian/Uruguay accent realizes it /ʃo soi/. This is most likely a funny coincidence and has no actual causal relation with the yollet/jollet question, but I thought I'd mention it for some plausibility of a hardened y sound