Very interesting thread, but let me throw in a caveat or two.
In the development of the logic of the opening post, it is of course perfectly acceptable to start with some assumptions, but let's look at them.
The first assumption is that the text is meaningful. All of it in fact. The logic of this assumption is quite reasonable: the discussion would become meaningless it it weren't. But it is an assumption nonetheless. By the way, with the phrase "all of it" I mean that it is also assumed that the text isn't a highly verbose encoding, such as (or example) every Voynich word would stand for one letter only. Or even every line.
The second assumption is that there is a reasonably close mapping of one Voynich character to one sound. Now I know that I did not phrase this very accurately, but I wouldn't know how to do it. In many (if not most) languages, small groups of characters are used to represent a single sound. The sound of English 'sh' for example, in IPA an integral sign, is written as a single character in many languages (scripts), as two characters in English and three in German (sch). So I understand that this would also be considered in the scope of the question of this thread.
The combination of these two assumptions really seems very reasonable. I daresay that the vast majority of people approaching the problem of the Voynich MS are making this combination of assumptions. However, I consider it entirely possible that this combination of assumptions is incorrect, and this would then explain the lack of success in understanding the Voynich MS text.
All this is very similar to the classical example of the guy looking for his lost keys near lanterns only.
But never mind. The exercise, even if it has a serious chance of being meaningless, is still interesting enough.
The first question related to phonology really has to be the separation into vowels and consonants. This has already been tried. The available algorithms (Sukhotin's, the use of Hidden Markov models) do lead to a split of the characters into vowels and consonants, but they don't tell us how successful / reliable these answers are. From my own on-going dabbing into HMM analysis, I can only conclude (prematurely), that this split isn't actually anywhere as successful as for languages like Italian or Latin. It doesn't really work.
Even while the Eva transcription alphabet makes the Voynich text almost pronounceable, it isn't really. I mean, someone from Russia or Poland might have no problem to pronounce a Voynich word like chcthy, but this doesn't work for everybody.
Another risky thing is to try to decide things on the basis of the shape of the character. This clearly does not work for the Latin alphabet. Just looking at majuscules, O and Q appear very similar, but obviously have no relation whatsoever. Same with E, F and L. It may therefor not work for Voynichese. However, here, we have the very funny effect that similar-looking shapes may appear in similar contexts. This is a key observation that requires an explanation, and I am not so sure that such an explanation can be a linguistic / phonetic one.
In the development of the logic of the opening post, it is of course perfectly acceptable to start with some assumptions, but let's look at them.
The first assumption is that the text is meaningful. All of it in fact. The logic of this assumption is quite reasonable: the discussion would become meaningless it it weren't. But it is an assumption nonetheless. By the way, with the phrase "all of it" I mean that it is also assumed that the text isn't a highly verbose encoding, such as (or example) every Voynich word would stand for one letter only. Or even every line.
The second assumption is that there is a reasonably close mapping of one Voynich character to one sound. Now I know that I did not phrase this very accurately, but I wouldn't know how to do it. In many (if not most) languages, small groups of characters are used to represent a single sound. The sound of English 'sh' for example, in IPA an integral sign, is written as a single character in many languages (scripts), as two characters in English and three in German (sch). So I understand that this would also be considered in the scope of the question of this thread.
The combination of these two assumptions really seems very reasonable. I daresay that the vast majority of people approaching the problem of the Voynich MS are making this combination of assumptions. However, I consider it entirely possible that this combination of assumptions is incorrect, and this would then explain the lack of success in understanding the Voynich MS text.
All this is very similar to the classical example of the guy looking for his lost keys near lanterns only.
But never mind. The exercise, even if it has a serious chance of being meaningless, is still interesting enough.
The first question related to phonology really has to be the separation into vowels and consonants. This has already been tried. The available algorithms (Sukhotin's, the use of Hidden Markov models) do lead to a split of the characters into vowels and consonants, but they don't tell us how successful / reliable these answers are. From my own on-going dabbing into HMM analysis, I can only conclude (prematurely), that this split isn't actually anywhere as successful as for languages like Italian or Latin. It doesn't really work.
Even while the Eva transcription alphabet makes the Voynich text almost pronounceable, it isn't really. I mean, someone from Russia or Poland might have no problem to pronounce a Voynich word like chcthy, but this doesn't work for everybody.
Another risky thing is to try to decide things on the basis of the shape of the character. This clearly does not work for the Latin alphabet. Just looking at majuscules, O and Q appear very similar, but obviously have no relation whatsoever. Same with E, F and L. It may therefor not work for Voynichese. However, here, we have the very funny effect that similar-looking shapes may appear in similar contexts. This is a key observation that requires an explanation, and I am not so sure that such an explanation can be a linguistic / phonetic one.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)