Syllabification

[Anton]

Okay... let's start with this: do you honestly believe that every ciphertext in existence has a glyph-for-glyph mapping onto the Roman alphabet that makes it pronounceable?  Because this is what you and others seem to be arguing here, and if you seriously believe this to be true then I don't really know what I'm supposed to say.

Actually I did not thought about it, but this is an interesting question. To answer it, we in the first place need to introduce some language-independent measure of pronounceability. Don't know if it exists (as I said, I'm zero in linguistics), but offhand it seems to me that pronounceability depends largely on the pronounciation rules of the language of choice (or perhaps it will be more appropriate to speak of language families here?) - what is pronounceable in one language may be not pronounceable in another language using the same alphabet.

As for ciphers, at least all substitution ciphers would have glyph-for-glyph pronounceable mapping onto the Roman alphabet. That's just trivial. Beyond substitution, I would not venture to assert anything, but offhand I don't see any reasons why at least a subset of ciphers may not have at least one "pronounceable" mapping (even however vague be the notion of "pronounceability").

That you don't understand it doesn't mean it was the author's intention to make it obscure.  All texts in languages that you can't read are obscure to you - that says nothing about the intentions of the people who wrote them.

That's true, but that does not waive the possibility of that intention. While I suggest to take the possibility of deliberate obfuscation of the message by means of these "pseudo-vowels" as one of the options for consideration, you prefer to waive it altogether. Actually you take them (the pseudo-vowels) at face value just because of their shape. What's the proof that they are vowels indeed? Little as I know of linguistics, I can give you al least one example offhand when the shape is disguising. The "hard sign" letter of the Russian alphabet is currently used as the division between a consonant and the subsequent vowel, but roughly until XII century it represented a vowel.

The point is that the script was clearly devised by someone who knew how to write Latin, a point which I'm not sure if you're actually disputing, or if you're just trying to nitpick.

No I am not disputing this (mailnly because this is supported by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. marginalia), but there are researchers who are. I won't speak for Bax or O'Donovan or others (let them defend their points of view themselves). What I mean is that scientific discourse should be based on criteria of scientific truth, not on assertions like "this is clear" or "this is evident" or "thus spake D'Imperio". What is "clear" for one researcher may be not "clear" for another - and the lack of consensus upon essential aspects of the VMS amongst different researchers shows that there are too few things that are really clear - that means, commonly acknowledged.