Deconstruction of Voynich Manuscript words

[don of tallahassee]

E and F in the Latin alphabet are similar letters - do you think of them as the same thing or interchangeable for some reason?

How about C and G and O?

They are similar in shape, but they are different letters. The glyphs are the same way. Each one has its own sound and identity.

Nobody gets to trade/substitute one for another for some unknown reason.

Thank you.

Don of Tallahassee

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Hi Don, I think that it would be perfectly acceptable, in the Roman script used for English, to consider words containing say, a voiceless consonant such as p/t/k to have some fundamental relationship with those containing similar voiced consonants such as b/d/g. They are not the same sounds, but they behave in very similar ways. Words like "puck" and "bug" are related in their structures, as are "blade" and "plate". To make separate rules to describe how each of these six sounds works would be redundant when they are so alike.
The same goes for Voynich words, where [t] and [k] are similar, or where words beginning [qo] don't seem vastly different from [o]. Generalizing may well miss some detail, but it may also reveal a fundamental link.

No.

They are different letters. They are treated as different letters in English, Latin, German and a bunch of other different languages.

Do you know of any languages where different letters are grouped together and treated alike when spelling words? Okay, except u/v and i/j (and possibly s/z in American/British English).

They aren't used any differently in the VMS that I can see. (And the u/v thing happens in Voynichese, too, although I think the i and j are separate glyphs.)

In Voynich words, they are found alone or in groups as glyph codes, the spelling (order and identity of the glyphs) of which is of vital importance in parsing/deconstructing accurately the information in each of the words. Changing a glyph to another would require giving its code group a different meaning. This means they aren't interchangeable.

I think you are mistaken.

Thank you.

Don of Tallahassee