Syllabification

[crezac]

Even if one puts apart the cipher theory, I am afraid that no syllabification is possible without our understanding of the alphabet. There is no confirmation that any of the transcription alphabets, EVA included, accurately represent the real alphabet adopted by the author.

We can't know it perfectly of course, but the distinction between consonant and vowel does seem quite clear.

CR: We can't even know it imperfectly without an understanding of how the alphabet encodes semantic or phonemic content.

This fact suggests nothing. A person wishing to conceal his message could well use these letters to represent consonants, for an additional layer of obscurity.

Everything about the script suggests that it was intended to emphasize the structure of the text, not obscure it.

CR: Unless that's what the scribe wanted you to think.  What you see isn't necessarily what is.

Besides, EVA e is not like Roman "e". It is like Roman "c".

And "c" is an "e" without the crossbar.  And there's a pretty clear reason why the scribe omitted the crossbar - the whole system of straight-stroke and curved-stroke letters which follow <a> and <e> respectively.

If the text is abbreviated, then single characters would represent character blocks, like 9 (EVA y) represented "us" in the end of the word and "con" in the beginning of the word in medieval Latin documents.

Among other problems, there aren't enough different glyphs for the text to be abbreviated Latin or anything else, although the shapes of the letters do derive from symbols used in Latin abbreviation (and the Roman alphabet).

CR: make that appear to derive and I can agree with it.  

Really, the fact that EVA transliteration makes the text basically "pronouncible", as would likely any other transliteration scheme that mapped <a>, <e>, <o>, and <y> to vowels and the other letters to consonants (and considered <i> as a modifier), is by itself strong evidence that its implicit assignment of consonant and vowel status is basically correct.

The "pronouncibility" of the EVA transliteration is mere phantom, partly because the transcription is not fully matched to the Latin alphabet (e.g. substitute "c" for EVA e, as indicated above, and you will lose this pronouncibility at once),

The fact that there's a mapping that makes the text pronounceable at all is significant.  If you don't think so, try finding a simple letter-for-letter mapping to make, say, the Beale Ciphers pronounceable.

The fact that the pronounceable mapping preserves the obvious consonant/vowel distinction in the Latin-derived VMS script is also significant.

CR: meh.  If it's significant tell me what it means.  That if you make the transcription as like Latin as possible it becomes more or less possible to pronounce the transcribed words?   If some of the consonants are vowels or diphthongs or if a couple of your vowels were W or L sounds the distribution could still be adequate to give you pronouncability, whatever that means in this context. And the Beale Cipher is a sucker bet example since it's extremely likely to be a total fraud.  The logic for having three separate ciphered documents doesn't even make sense.

and partly because EVA is Latin-alphabet centric - while there is no confirmation that the Latin alphabet was the basis for the Voynichese script. For example, characters like a, c, i, o are found in the Cyrillic alphabet, characters l, d , r, y, q are like Arabic digits, and the rest of the characters are not found in the Latin alphabet at all.

I'd say that being Latin-centric and excess focus on EVA is the worst approach for those who wish to explore the plain text  language path. EVA has quite little to do with the real Voynichese alphabet, and absolutely nothing with the Voynichese language (if any).

You are now contradicting what you wrote above, about EVA <y> deriving from Latin abbreviations.  I think it's been well-established for a long time, and is obvious to begin with, that the VMS script derives from medieval Latin abbreviations and from the Roman alphabet, and that there is really no need to look further afield for the origins of the shapes of the letters.  The tables in D'Imperio show this well enough.  

CR:  so sad there aren't more things obvious about VMS. There are characters in VMS that could be from the Maltese alphabet and early Etruscan which aren't like Latin characters and are still in VMS. And others that seem entirely original to the manuscript. Obviously someone messed up when writing VMS since not all the characters are derived "from medieval Latin abbreviations and from the Roman alphabet"  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that are which leaves a few unaccounted for, hardly "well enough".

The way that these letter shapes are used is different and the shapes have been tailored somewhat to fit the structure of the text and to produce an internally consistent system.  I think this aspect of the VMS is pretty well-established at this point.

CR:  Frankly, I'm beginning to have some serious doubts that anything about the text in VMS is "pretty well established" at this point.  Either that or my standards for evidence are way too high.

Second, the entropy is too low.

As I noted in another thread, it is technically not reliable to speak of (character) entropy in respect to a written language when we don't know what is that language's alphabet.

We know the alphabet well enough to show that the entropy is going to be low no matter how you combine or split the glyphs.  The low entropy is really just telling you how rigid the phonotactic structure (i.e. rules governing how the glyphs may be combined to form words) is, and this can be understood without using math at all.

CR: Or the low entropy is telling you that EVA has some mistakes in it and that iii and ii and i may be three distinct characters or three distinct combination of anywhere from 1 to 4 characters. That the phonotactic structure isn't that rigid because you have a larger character set than you think you do.  [b] Maybe it's telling you you don't know the alphabet as well as you think you do.  Inconvenient if true. But believing that anything about VMS "has been well-established for a long time, and is obvious to begin with" is hubris and limiting.[/b]