The second thing is phonological. You are not allowed to view links.
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22 consonants are:
- 1 consonant appearing at both beginning and end of a syllable: n (N)
- 1 consonant appearing only at the end of a syllable: ŋ (NG)
- 17 consonants appearing only at the beginning of a syllable: p (B), pʰ (P), m (M), f (F), t (D), tʰ (T), l (L), k (G), kʰ (K), x (H), ʈ͡ʂ (ZH), ʈ͡ʂʰ (CH), ʂ (SH), ɻ ~ ʐ (R), t͡s (Z), t͡sʰ (C), s (S)
- 3 allophones appearing only at the beginning of a syllable: t͡ɕ (J), t͡ɕʰ (Q), ɕ (X)
12 vowels are:
- 5 basic vowels appearing either standalone or with other sounds: a (A), e (E), i (I), u (U), y (Ü / YU)
- 1 vowel appearing only standalone: ɚ̯ (ER)
- 6 allophones appearing with other sounds: ɛ (A), o (O, allophone of E), ə ~ ɤ (E), ɿ (I), ʅ (I), ʊ (O, allophone of U)*
* (O, allophone of E) means that this sound is spelled as O in Pinyin, but an allophone of E. O could also appear standalone (without consonant) as onomatopoeia and interjection, and is actually pronounced [o], so Hanyu Pinyin assigns it a separate letter for this case. In other cases where O appear with consonants, it is an allophone of either E or U
So the question is, in Voynichese, how many vowels are there in its letters? Though we do not know exactly what letters are consonants or vowels, we could still try to interpret them. EVA transcribes
a,
e,
i,
o, and
[font=Eva]y[/font] as a, e, i, o and y, so I temporarily assume these five letters are vowels.
It seems that 5 vowels in Voynichese is enough for Mandarin Chinese, if we write no allophones, and write ER as E + R like Pinyin does. However, You are not allowed to view links.
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a and
[font=Eva]y[/font] as the same, Voynichese would probably have only 4 vowel letters. It may be still OK for Modern Standard Chinese, because we can spell [y] (Ü / YU) as digraph iu, similar to what Pinyin does.
According to You are not allowed to view links.
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Anyway, vowels are basically fine, because sometimes we do not need vowels to be that precisely recorded to understand (example: English). This probably is also true for Voynichese, so I would say that Voynichese letters are probably fine to record vowels of Mandarin Chinese.
However, to represent
consonants is much harder.
On voynichese.com, I see only 22 letters to input. I guess these are common letters.
If we remove 5 “vowel” letters
a,
e,
i,
o, and
[font=Eva]y[/font], we have 17 left.
If we remove rare letters such as
v,
x and
[font=Eva]z[/font], we have 14 left.
If we remove
h that does not appear independently, we have 13 left.
Considering that
ch,
s and
[font=Eva]Sh[/font] are probably different letters, we have 14.
Considering that
cFh,
cPh,
cKh, and
[font=Eva]cTh[/font] may be extra letters, we have 18.
According to You are not allowed to view links.
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- 3 consonants appearing at both beginning and end of a syllable: m, n, ŋ
- 17 consonants appearing only at the beginning of a syllable: p, pʰ, f, v, t, tʰ, l, k, kʰ, x, t͡ʃ, t͡ʃʰ, ʃ, ʒ, t͡s, t͡sʰ, s
- 4 allophones appearing only at the beginning of a syllable: ʈ͡ʂ, ʈ͡ʂʰ, ʂ, ʐ
Even if we ignore 4 allophones, we still have 20 consonants to record. It won’t be that hard for 18 letters, because digraphs can be used.
However, if I’m remembering correctly, there are posts about gallow characters being less frequent in normal lines than in first lines. So I wonder if gallow letters and benched letters are just another form variant of other letters. If we have 18 letters for consonant, it would be fine to record Chinese. But, if we have to remove 8 gallows and have only 10 letters for consonant, it would be very insufficient to record Chinese phonology.
These two things are currently preventing me from accepting Chinese as the underlying language. In my opinion, if we want to say the underlying language is Chinese, we have to find good explanations for these two things.