Alternatives to alphabet?

[ReneZ]

Everything I see points to alphabet (i.e. 1 glyph = 1 segmental phoneme, basically)

• Number of glyphs matches alphabets
  
• Apparent pronounceability and consonant/vowel alternation when viewed as alphabetic
  
• Apparent derivation from Roman alphabet and Latin abbreviation means the script creator was familiar with alphabetic writing
  
• Structure and symmetry of the glyph set is similar to what is seen in phoneme inventories of natural languages
  
• Word length
  

The only other possibility is that glyphs represent sub-alphabetic units.  Stolfi thought the words were likely monosyllables, apparently because many words have a tripartite structure which could suggest that a word represents a CVC syllable.   Actually that's just a guess since I haven't yet found where he laid out his reasoning for his view in detail, if he ever did.  I can maybe imagine that a medieval Latin scribe might have chosen to represent a complex monosyllable by way of analogy with a multisyllabic word, but my guess is that words actually are multisyllabic in many cases.

Picking this post as the most suitable basis for a general reply.

I do not feel certain about just about anything.

The number of characters is clearly in the range of a normal alphabet, even if we can't be certain about the exact number.
In the majority of alphabetic scripts, one has a mixture of several things:
- one symbol representing one sound
- several symbols together representing one sound (consonant or vowel)
- one symbol representing a sequence of sounds (vowel, and more rarely consonant, e.g. Greek psi).
- the sound of a symbol depending on context (neighboring sounds)
Of course, modern alphabetical conventions should not play a role.

The biggest 'problem' with the Voynich alphabet, in my opinion, is the funny behaviour of Eva 'ch', I could imagine many things, for example in case the text is a phonetic rendition of some language foreign to the author/scribe:

Eva-'ch' could just be aspiration, like the 'h' in English. 'ch' and 'sh' could be different types (real or perceived) like the two different sipritus symbols in Greek.
ckh and cth could be aspirated versions of unaspirated consonants k and t. (all Eva)

I know some details of only two (largely) monosyllabic languages, and they are already quite different. The syllable structure can still vary considerably from the main CV and CVC patterns.

On another note, as an illustration of the many different things that one may expect or should beware of is the interesting phoneme 'ng' which is written with this pair of characters in most modern languages.
Equally in most of these languages, the character sequence n-k is to be pronounced as ng-k.
Furthermore, this phoneme does not occur at the start of words.

But there are exceptions.
In (classical?) Greek, gamma becomes 'ng' before kappa.
In Thai, n-k remains n-k and ng-k also exists. There are 'minimal pairs' with this combination.
In Thai and Vietnamese, 'ng' can occur at the start of a word. I know some people learning Thai who can't get the hang of this, and in some regions even Thai people can't and it's pronounced as 'h'.

I'm not saying that any of these last points has a direct bearing on the Voynich MS text, of course. Just examples in the good old spirit of Jacques Guy, about the many, many unexpected things that may occur.