Phonology of Voynichese

[geoffreycaveney]

It's also great to see yet another way of testing the script which shows the same set [e, a, o, y] split at the base from other glyphs.

Hi Emma, 
the way in which e,a,o,y differ from the other glyphs appears to be the clearest "phonological" fact. I agree that it is reassuring that several different methods arrive at the same result in this case.

I appreciate all of the contributions to this interesting discussion, and especially Marco's extensive illustrative chart.

But I have a simple observation and a question about the set [e, a, o, y] :

A simple search on voynichese.com for the string "*[glyph]*" reveals how frequently (in how many word tokens) a given glyph occurs in medial position, with another glyph, signified by "*", occurring both before it and after it. (It does not have to be the same glyph before and after it, just any glyph before it and any glyph after it.)

Here are the results of this string search for the glyphs in the set [e, a, o, y] :

medial [e]  ("*[e]*")  :  14209 matches
medial [a]  ("*[a]*")  :  11749 matches
medial [o]  ("*[o]*")  :  14411 matches
medial [y]  ("*[y]*")  :      471 matches

Such a strikingly low frequency of medial occurrences, in contrast to all the other "vowel-like" glyphs, is rather strange for a vowel glyph, is it not?

What type of letter might pattern like a vowel in initial and final position, but rarely occur where vowels do in medial position?

Perhaps /s/, which can occur frequently even after other consonants in final position in many languages, and which can occur in initial position even before other consonants in many languages in clusters such as /st/, /sk/, /sp/, /sl/, /sm/, and /sn/, but which would much less frequently occur between two consonants in medial position, unlike vowels?

Geoffrey