24-02-2017, 12:09 AM
Thanks for starting this thread, as I feel this could be an interesting discussion. Let me make clear the meanings I attach to certain terminology, and then I'll discuss the characters you mention.
First, I avoid the word 'letter' because I feel it is too definitive by referring to the writing of language. I prefer that each separate mark is called a character, though glyph is also fine. We don't know fully how to parse the characters, though most would appear to be discrete and the total number is finite. Most of the text is made up of a small number of identifiable characters, and this is true should the text be linguistic, a cipher, or some kind of procedurally-generated hoax. So all characters are characters by definition.
Next, the issue of sound only occurs if we believe that the text is a plainly-written language (a cipher text would have underlying sound, but not necessarily linked to individual letters and not recoverable by the simple study of the text's surface patterns). All scripts represent linguistic sound to some degree. If we make the assumption that the text is linguistic then it follows that we must determine what kind of script we are observing. The only possible answer, due to the relatively low number of common characters, is a script which is mostly phonemic.
(For those with no linguistic background, a phoneme is a sound perceived by speakers of a language. If speakers consider two sounds to be the same, then those two sounds together constitute a phoneme, even if speakers of other languages consider them to be different sounds. For example, the /l/ sounds in English 'milk' and 'lime' are different, but English speakers generally consider them to be the same (and would be surprised to be told they're not!). In the context of Voynich research I doubt the distinction between sound (what a linguist would call a 'phone') and phoneme is terribly important.)
So, the question we get down to is, in a linguistic analysis, can all the characters be explained phonemically? That is, the pattern of the characters within the text must be explainable as a fair representation of phonemes within language. Note that we, for the moment, don't have to explain the pattern of phonemes with reference to a specific language, only that the patterns can be linguistic or language-like. This is important because, even were the text not a natural language, if the writer wanted to create something which could be spoken he would still have to abide by linguistic rules because it would be spoken by humans. Remember, Klingon and Sindarin are human languages, just not natural ones!
For many characters in the Voynich script there seems to be little doubt or disagreement that they are phonemically plausible. Even strings such as eee or iin could easily be explained as trigraphs (or poorly parsed single characters) without serious issue. Of the characters mentioned above by Rene, I would say that they fall into two groups: q and y are core characters whereas f p m g are marginal. I see no reason why q and y cannot be phonemic, and I think arguments as to their oddness betray a lack of linguistic imagination.
For f p m g there are clear environments in which they occur which do not undermine linguistic explanation but rather shift it from the characters to the environment. We know that the beginnings and ends of lines show different patterns, with the latter being the major locations of m and g. We can turn them into a single phenomenon by saying that the line break is a shared environment, and that whatever conditions the ends of lines also conditions the beginnings. We still won't know what it is, but we can show that the distribution of those two characters is not a feature just of those characters. Likewise with f and p, their environment needs to be explained and not necessarily the characters.
I'm sorry if this is a lot of words, but I am happy for the discussion.
First, I avoid the word 'letter' because I feel it is too definitive by referring to the writing of language. I prefer that each separate mark is called a character, though glyph is also fine. We don't know fully how to parse the characters, though most would appear to be discrete and the total number is finite. Most of the text is made up of a small number of identifiable characters, and this is true should the text be linguistic, a cipher, or some kind of procedurally-generated hoax. So all characters are characters by definition.
Next, the issue of sound only occurs if we believe that the text is a plainly-written language (a cipher text would have underlying sound, but not necessarily linked to individual letters and not recoverable by the simple study of the text's surface patterns). All scripts represent linguistic sound to some degree. If we make the assumption that the text is linguistic then it follows that we must determine what kind of script we are observing. The only possible answer, due to the relatively low number of common characters, is a script which is mostly phonemic.
(For those with no linguistic background, a phoneme is a sound perceived by speakers of a language. If speakers consider two sounds to be the same, then those two sounds together constitute a phoneme, even if speakers of other languages consider them to be different sounds. For example, the /l/ sounds in English 'milk' and 'lime' are different, but English speakers generally consider them to be the same (and would be surprised to be told they're not!). In the context of Voynich research I doubt the distinction between sound (what a linguist would call a 'phone') and phoneme is terribly important.)
So, the question we get down to is, in a linguistic analysis, can all the characters be explained phonemically? That is, the pattern of the characters within the text must be explainable as a fair representation of phonemes within language. Note that we, for the moment, don't have to explain the pattern of phonemes with reference to a specific language, only that the patterns can be linguistic or language-like. This is important because, even were the text not a natural language, if the writer wanted to create something which could be spoken he would still have to abide by linguistic rules because it would be spoken by humans. Remember, Klingon and Sindarin are human languages, just not natural ones!
For many characters in the Voynich script there seems to be little doubt or disagreement that they are phonemically plausible. Even strings such as eee or iin could easily be explained as trigraphs (or poorly parsed single characters) without serious issue. Of the characters mentioned above by Rene, I would say that they fall into two groups: q and y are core characters whereas f p m g are marginal. I see no reason why q and y cannot be phonemic, and I think arguments as to their oddness betray a lack of linguistic imagination.
For f p m g there are clear environments in which they occur which do not undermine linguistic explanation but rather shift it from the characters to the environment. We know that the beginnings and ends of lines show different patterns, with the latter being the major locations of m and g. We can turn them into a single phenomenon by saying that the line break is a shared environment, and that whatever conditions the ends of lines also conditions the beginnings. We still won't know what it is, but we can show that the distribution of those two characters is not a feature just of those characters. Likewise with f and p, their environment needs to be explained and not necessarily the characters.
I'm sorry if this is a lot of words, but I am happy for the discussion.
