The Voynich Ninja

The spelling is different, but I really hope English spelling and all of its artefacts is not too relevant for Voynichese. 

The point is that in spoken language, a sound that is usually a consonant can still act like a vowel. If we were to spell out that spoken language, wobble would be wobl and BR button would be butn. The l and the n are used as vowels.

(25-09-2016, 04:57 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The spelling is different, but I really hope English spelling and all of its artefacts is not too relevant for Voynichese. 

The point is that in spoken language, a sound that is usually a consonant can still act like a vowel. If we were to spell out that spoken language, wobble would be wobl and BR button would be butn. The l and the n are used as vowels.

Here is how I would word it... in spoken language, a letter than is usually a consonant can act like a syllable (a consonant that sounds like it is combined with a vowel). Hence the name "syllabic consonant". This isn't about consonants that sound like vowels. This is about consonants that imply/sound out both the vowel and consonant with only one letter to create what we think of as a syllable.

Thus, the word "button" is not a syllabic consonant because the consonant "n" is ONLY a consonant (it does not function as a vowel-and-consonant on its own because the vowel is already there).


Look at the name. It's not vowel-consonant, it's syllabic consonant (a consonant that behaves as a syllable). In "rhythm" the "m" functions as a syllable. In "bottom" (as in "button") the last letter does not function as a syllable (the syllable is "om" not "m") so it's not a syllabic consonant.

Hi JKP, I think you have misunderstood the concept of a syllabic consonant.

It is not a consonant that sounds as though it has combined with a vowel. It is not a consonant that only forms a syllable alone.

It is a consonant which takes the position of a vowel in a syllable (the nucleus) on its own, without a vowel. A syllable with a consonant as its nucleus has no vowel. Not an inserted vowel, not a vowel plus consonant, but no vowel whatsoever.

Also, a syllabic consonant is not simply acting like a syllable, but as a proper nucleus. A complex syllable containing multiple other consonants can be built around it. The Czech word for 'finger' is prst. The /r/ is syllabic and forms the sole nucleus in the word, just like the /a/ in English 'past'.

(25-09-2016, 05:54 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi JKP, I think you have misunderstood the concept of a syllabic consonant.

It is not a consonant that sounds as though it has combined with a vowel. It is not a consonant that only forms a syllable alone.

It is a consonant which takes the position of a vowel in a syllable (the nucleus) on its own, without a vowel. A syllable with a consonant as its nucleus has no vowel. Not an inserted vowel, not a vowel plus consonant, but no vowel whatsoever.

Also, a syllabic consonant is not simply acting like a syllable, but as a proper nucleus. A complex syllable containing multiple other consonants can be built around it. The Czech word for 'finger' is prst. The /r/ is syllabic and forms the sole nucleus in the word, just like the /a/ in English 'past'.

Emma, look at your statement that I underlined. It is not only taking the position of the vowel, it is frequently taking the sound of the vowel and most importantly, it is taking the function of the vowel and consonant together. If it weren't, there would be no reason to designate it as "syllabic".

I have not misunderstood it.


Plus, I know that it can be a proper nucleus, but I was trying to keep it simple, so we could agree on this step by step. I know other consonants can be built around it, but if we don't agree on the fundamental concept, then the rest of it can't be discussed either.

I agree that in the Czech word prst, the "r" is a syllabic consonant. It functions as we would expect a vowel-consonant combination would in English, or as a syllabic consonant "m" in rhythm does in English. It's called a syllabic consonant because it behaves as we might write "er" in English (or whatever we have that's closest in sound to the implied vowel in English) which, in English, we designate as a syllable (yes I know the syllable might include more than just "er" but I'm trying to stick to basic building blocks until we have agreement that the word "syllable/syllabic" is used for reason of the consonant doing double-duty as a vowel-consonant combination, even if the syllable comprises more than the implied vowel and the consonant).


I don't agree with Koen's statement that a syllabic consonant is a consonant that sounds like a vowel. A syllabic consonant is a consonant that functions like a syllable (the vowel and the consonant together) even if it's part of a larger unit that we would designate as the actual syllable (I think your example of "past" was a good one—obviously the syllable encompasses more than the "as").


Emma, would you agree that the "m" in rhythm is a syllabic consonant and the "m" in bottom is not?

I will no longer post or comment on the issue of syllabic consonants in this thread. I beg everybody else to end the derail and allow the discussion to return to the main topic.

Sam, and others, if you would like to respond to my earlier post regarding o, a, and y, please do so.

(25-09-2016, 12:56 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Sam, first off, I'm happy we're having this conversation. I think it must be the most sustained discussion of Voynich phonology in a long time.

Thanks.  It's definitely nice to talk to someone who knows something about the text and has at least a somewhat compatible idea about what is going on with it.

Quote:

(25-09-2016, 02:05 AM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's possible, but there are also words ending in es and ees so interpreting y as a consonant in this context also makes sense (assuming we regard s as a consonant).

Also there are words ending in oy, which are admittedly very rare but this would also point to y functioning as a consonant (in parallel with common o-endings ol and or).

Where do words ending eos and eeos fit in with this? My own hypothesis is that y disappears in many internal positions and transforms into a in others. There are plenty of cases in internal y, but maybe fewer than we would expect.

I did read your blog posts about this theory a while back... maybe I will re-read them.  I remember not really understanding why y should be assumed to have been deleted in various places.

Anyway, I don't dispute that y does in fact behave like o in many cases.  But I think it also behaves as a consonant in other ways.  Basically it seems to have a role in two separate subsystems of the script, if that makes sense.

Maybe this will make it clear what I'm getting at:

or ar
os es

ol al
oy ey

Basically it seems that l is to y as r is to s, both in terms of where these letters may and may not occur (at least with respect to when they follow vowels), and in terms of the shapes of the letters themselves.  Now, I know that these shapes are borrowed from (abbreviated) Latin, and in Latin the similarities between these shapes are coincidental, as they are not related to one another.  But in Voynichese they're clearly not coincidental - whoever devised the script selected letters such that their shapes would relate to the role the letters play in words and so that the script would have this kind of symmetry and structure in it.

I don't feel comfortable throwing this kind of information away, and in fact in my mind it takes precedence over ideas from linguistic theory.  But there's not necessarily a contradiction.  If on the one hand y sometimes behaves like o and on the other hand it's part of a system with other letters that seem to be consonants, then one explanation could be that it's a syllabic consonant.  Another explanation, and perhaps a better one, is that y is simply representing two entirely different sounds (one a vowel and one a consonant).  Maybe there are other possibilities.  I admit that I've found it a bit puzzling.

Quote:

Quote:A word like lkaiin would seem to parallel ykaiin, would it not?  And again there's the fact that y and l seem to be related generally.

I would assume ykaiin parallels okaiin.

Well, I agree that's more likely to be true in a grammatical sense, but phonetically, if we're assuming ykaiin is a two-syllable word, then it's not obvious that lkaiin is not also a two-syllable word (though, perhaps it is only one syllable).

Quote:Anyway, I don't dispute that y does in fact behave like o in many cases.  But I think it also behaves as a consonant in other ways.  Basically it seems to have a role in two separate subsystems of the script, if that makes sense.

Maybe this will make it clear what I'm getting at:

or ar
os es

ol al
oy ey

Basically it seems that l is to y as r is to s, both in terms of where these letters may and may not occur (at least with respect to when they follow vowels), and in terms of the shapes of the letters themselves.  Now, I know that these shapes are borrowed from (abbreviated) Latin, and in Latin the similarities between these shapes are coincidental, as they are not related to one another.  But in Voynichese they're clearly not coincidental - whoever devised the script selected letters such that their shapes would relate to the role the letters play in words and so that the script would have this kind of symmetry and structure in it.

I don't feel comfortable throwing this kind of information away, and in fact in my mind it takes precedence over ideas from linguistic theory.  But there's not necessarily a contradiction.  If on the one hand y sometimes behaves like o and on the other hand it's part of a system with other letters that seem to be consonants, then one explanation could be that it's a syllabic consonant.  Another explanation, and perhaps a better one, is that y is simply representing two entirely different sounds (one a vowel and one a consonant).  Maybe there are other possibilities.  I admit that I've found it a bit puzzling.

I don't believe that character shapes are entirely incidental either. I think that there may be an element of design. So I agree we shouldn't discard that. Where the look of a shape and its statistics bear similarity with another, we have a good observation we need to explain.

We are in agreement that y acts like a vowel (or at least like a and o, which we believe to be vowels) in certain places. We also agree that l is a consonant (whether it can be syllabic is another matter). The core part of our disagreement is that y acts like a consonant, specifically l, in some places.

The two examples you give above, oy and ey, can be paralleled in the behaviour of other vowels and don't need to be explained as y acting like a consonant. Thus:

oy (146 tokens) is parallel to oa (282 tokens) and oo (84 tokens)
ey (4025 tokens) is parallel to ea (448 tokens) and eo (3454 tokens)

(26-09-2016, 11:40 AM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We are in agreement that y acts like a vowel (or at least like a and o, which we believe to be vowels) in certain places. We also agree that l is a consonant (whether it can be syllabic is another matter). The core part of our disagreement is that y acts like a consonant, specifically l, in some places.

Basically.  I see how you could think of y as solely representing a vowel... but I don't think it's right.

Quote:The two examples you give above, oy and ey, can be paralleled in the behaviour of other vowels and don't need to be explained as y acting like a consonant. Thus:

oy (146 tokens) is parallel to oa (282 tokens) and oo (84 tokens)
ey (4025 tokens) is parallel to ea (448 tokens) and eo (3454 tokens)

But if you consider word-final occurrences only, the stats will look different.  oa, ea, and oo are going to be nearly non-existent.

(27-09-2016, 09:07 AM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The two examples you give above, oy and ey, can be paralleled in the behaviour of other vowels and don't need to be explained as y acting like a consonant. Thus:

Quote:oy (146 tokens) is parallel to oa (282 tokens) and oo (84 tokens)
ey (4025 tokens) is parallel to ea (448 tokens) and eo (3454 tokens)

But if you consider word-final occurrences only, the stats will look different.  oa, ea, and oo are going to be nearly non-existent.

Word finally is a specific position. The character a mostly doesn't occur word finally because it seems to be conditioned by the following character. So oa and ea [font=Arial]are never going to be common, indeed, they're just variants of [font=Eva]oy and ey anyway.

oo is not particularly common, but many of its occurrences are near the beginning of a word in the string qoo. The five occurrences it does have word finally may be statistically appropriate (I don't know).[/font][/font]

(25-09-2016, 12:09 AM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(24-09-2016, 11:46 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I was actually thinking the opposite! Typically, if a language allows a consonant to be syllabic, it should allow all consonants of higher sonority to be syllabic. Liquids are more sonorant than nasals, thus if ch and sh are nasals, then we would expect that whatever represent /r, l/ to be syllabic too.

Well, I did not know that, but it's not a problem if y and l are syllabic consonants representing liquids.

Actually, unless I'm missing something, it appears that both Cantonese and Swahili have syllabic nasals without having syllabic liquids.  So I'm not sure how rare this situation is after all.

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Quote:A terminal can be an approximant consonant, a nasal consonant, or a stop consonant. The approximant /j/ is rounded after rounded vowels.[7] Nasal consonants can occur as base syllables in their own right and these are known as syllabic nasals.

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Quote:The nasal stops are pronounced as separate syllables when they appear before a heterorganic plosive (e.g. mtoto /m̩.ˈto.to/ 'child') or represent a separate morpheme (e.g. nilimpiga /ni.li.m̩.ˈpi.ɠa/ 'I hit him'), and prenasalized stops are decomposed into two syllables if the word would otherwise have one syllable: mbwa /ˈm̩.ɓwa/ 'dog', with an implosive b. However, that otherwise does not happen: ndizi ('banana') has two syllables, /ˈⁿdi.zi/, as does nenda /ˈne.ⁿda/ (not */ˈnen.ɗa/) 'go'.

It looks like both of these languages have one liquid consonant each, but I don't see anything about it being syllabic in either case.