A key to understand the VMS

[ThomasCoon]

All this really shows is that Voynichese is not like English or Arabic.  By contrast, look at a table of allowed syllables in Mandarin Chinese, for instance:

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The possible syllables of Mandarin certainly do form a "network".  It is not exactly the same as Voynichese in every respect, of course, but this is getting us a lot closer.

Sam,

Please forgive my straightforward speech, but I think this is a fallible tactic often used by proponents of the "natural language" hypothesis. There are 7000 natural languages to draw from. If one feature of the VMS is problematic (syllabic structure), one language is mentioned (Chinese). If another feature of VMS is problematic (relations between similar-looking words), a different language is cited (Japanese). If a third feature is odd, a third language is cited, and so on. I can't remember if you also mentioned Arabic in the past, or if that was only Emma.

Either way you get my point: Voynichese can't be all these languages simultaneously with all these strange features. There is no language with the syllabic structure of Chinese, the "atomic roots" of a polysynthetic language, a head-right suffix system like the Japanese ko-so-a-do words words, etc. etc. etc. We would need a rare, mythical, platypus-like language and that seems unlikely.