12-02-2016, 10:01 AM
I share some of these considerations, especially that strings of i's are to be grouped with the preceding character (almost always a). Currier's alphabet has grouped them with the following character, which probably affected many people's way of mentally parsing them.
To talk about vowels and consonants is tempting, but there is the serious problem that the most common technique to identify them, i.e. with the aid of a hidden Markov model, fails for the Voynich MS text. Reddy and Knight describe this briefly, but it was already shown by others before.
Syllables are also tricky, because they are extremely language dependent. In some languages they are clearly identifiable and follow clear rules, and in others they barely play a role. English strikes me as a particularly difficult case for parsing syllables from the written text. (Going by vowels certainly won't work...).
Some languages are happy to have syllables without vowels.
Dutch has to have vowels in each syllable, but can still have long consonant clusters (angstschreeuw).
Some Asian languages can have only very limited combinations of consonants (i.e. without a vowel in between).
To talk about vowels and consonants is tempting, but there is the serious problem that the most common technique to identify them, i.e. with the aid of a hidden Markov model, fails for the Voynich MS text. Reddy and Knight describe this briefly, but it was already shown by others before.
Syllables are also tricky, because they are extremely language dependent. In some languages they are clearly identifiable and follow clear rules, and in others they barely play a role. English strikes me as a particularly difficult case for parsing syllables from the written text. (Going by vowels certainly won't work...).
Some languages are happy to have syllables without vowels.
Dutch has to have vowels in each syllable, but can still have long consonant clusters (angstschreeuw).
Some Asian languages can have only very limited combinations of consonants (i.e. without a vowel in between).