03-02-2016, 08:18 PM
(03-02-2016, 12:19 PM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As Jacques Guy used to say in the distant past, it will be hard to find any peculiarity that doesn't exist in some language somewhere.
On these two or three points, it may be a matter of taste whether one calls them peculiar or something more strongly.
If we take Mandarin Chinese for example, its rendition in Pinyin shows a structure that is even more rigid (I would say) than the Voynich MS. There are only some 400 allowed combinations (not counting the tones), and one can almost freely replace consonants by other ones and end up with another valid (pinyin) word.
Other East Asian languages will have various different rules.
For me the equivalent functions of k / t, ch / sh, and l / r remain highly suspicious. The best I can come up with is that someone was trying to render a language with unknown sounds, and had to make choices on the fly....
This doesn't work for everything though. The ending -m can appear where -l or -r can appear, but preferably at line ends. This more suggests an elaborate way of writing (say) -r, but then there are labels that differ only by the ending -r or -m.
So far, I can only think of quite contrived explanations.
Two sounds which seem functionally equivalent within words and can be freely switched is relatively normal in languages. The sounds may appear in the same word environment and have contrastive distribution--they can replace one another to make a new word. Often those sounds share some fundamental relationship, or at least have some commonality: vowels can replace vowels but not consonants, stop replace stops but not sonorants, and so on. Phonologically this is all fine.
The main difficulty is that the words themselves may or may not exist. Like you say with Mandarian Chinese, the number of possible syllables is rather small and many (or most?) exist as words. Some language have an even smaller number of possible syllables, and making any permissable swap is highly likely to give a real word. Yet even in English, which has a complex word structure and a lot of "gappiness" in what words actually occur (tens of thousands of syllables are possible, supposedly), we can still identify real "sounding" words from unreal ones: glik might be something, but kgil isn't.
It would seem we're simply dealing with a language where: 1) [k, t], [ch, sh], and [r, l] are phonologically related sounds, and 2) the number of possible syllables is relatively small. I'm happy with both of these points, especially as I believe there are elements of featuralism in the Voynich script (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and these pairs of characters have graphic similarities too.
As for the line end letter [m], it is really a part of a bigger issue that includes line beginning transformations, what Currier would have called the "line as a functional unit". They've vexed me for some months now though I've sought to get a handle on them. I can only just about describe the problem, and any solution to the whole is far away (though likely very important). I think there is a systemic problem which causes them both, possibly something to do with sandhi, pausa, and the messy transition from oral to written culture. I'll write about it before long, but I'm not sure if it is anything more than a shaky guess.