[split] An interview with Stephen Bax - 1 to 1 substitution discussion

[-JKP-]

English has 26 letters which represent 44 common sounds. Same as Voynichese.

It's not the same as Voynichese.

In English (and other languages) you can shuffle those letters around to create those sounds. For example, SH and HS are different sounds, based on the order of the letters. So are TH and HT. You cannot do that in Voynichese. It has severe restrictions on the position of the glyphs.


For example...

• vords like daiin... the iin part can only be preceded by "o" or "a" and with rare exceptions, it can only be at the end of a vord.
  
• ot or its variants 4ot and yot are almost always at the beginnings of words.
  
• cc is almost invariably midword.
  
• d9 (dy) is almost invariably at the ends of vords.
  

... and there are many more examples.

When you restrict the position of the glyph, you are also restricting the possible sounds that can be represented by that glyph. If you use three glyphs for one sound (as was suggested in the original video), then the available pool for remaining sounds is significantly diminished not only because they are less in number, but because their associated positional rules are restricted even further by association.

Voynichese is full of positional restrictions that are not characteristic of natural languages. Even Asian languages, which have a few of these characteristics (the ones that are syllabic) do not have anywhere near as many restrictions.

• vords like daiin... the iin part can only be preceded by "o" or "a" and with rare exceptions, it can only be at the end of a vord.
  
• ot or its variants 4ot and yot are almost always at the beginnings of words.
  
• cc is almost invariably midword.
  
• d9 (dy) is almost invariably at the ends of vords.
  

I love the words 'almost' and 'with rare exceptions' in these examples. That means immediately that these are NOT 'severe restrictions'!  This for me is an example of overanalysing and ending up in a self-imposed dead end. 

There are perfectly enough symbols in the Voynich script to accommodate two sounds in the region of /r/ , and a terminal symbol (EVA m) as a counterpart to the main symbol (EVA r).  But we are so far from having a full sound/symbol correspondence list that at this stage the discussion is a waste of breath. It doesn't move us forward in any way, so personally I intend to waste no more time on it, and focus instead on continuing to try to decode the script.

The exceptions are rare. Some of them may be copying errors. When you have something that occurs 5,467 times in a specific way and then you find it on one of those lines in the manuscript where you can't tell if something is a space, a half-space or no space, then one ends up with a few exceptions.

There are also a few places where it's simply impossible to tell if the character is "o" or "a" because it's been drawn like something in between.


I have examined every glyph in the manuscript at least three or four times because I created a full transcript.


How often do you see EVA-k or EVA-t at the ends of Vwords?
How often is EVA-l preceded by anything other than EVA-o or EVA-a?
How often does aiin occur anywhere other than the end of a Vord?
How often does EVA-dy occur anywhere other than the end of a vord?
How often does a benched gallows occur at the end of a vord?

Even if there are exceptions (and there aren't many), Voynichese is very positionally constrained. A few exceptions do not change the basic structure of text that spans a couple of hundred pages.

In natural languages, a variety of sounds is created by combining letters in different ways (earlier I used the examples SH and HS). You can't do these kinds of recombinations in Voynichese, it follows a set of rules, which significantly restricts the numbers of sounds that could potentially be represented (assuming the representation of sounds is even intended, which it may not be).


How many natural languages have restrictions as severe as these as to a character's position in a word? I've done a very extensive search of languages trying to find something that is even half as restrictive and have not, so far.