Number of syllables distribution

[Emma May Smith]

Yes, the restricted length of Voynich words is rather interesting. It may simply be that the usual language of the text doesn't have very long words but also that longer words have been split or shortened. I note that longer words do exist, and these could be proper names or from a different language and therefore great targets for investigation.

I suppose if we could program something to automatically split all the words (I only did about the one thousand most common) we could quickly spot the very long and unusual. There's also the potential for automatic syllable identification and creating statistics about what syllables occur with others and in what positions. Details from my syllabification show that [i] sequences are much rarer in words with three syllables while [e] sequences seem to be roughly equally spread across words regardless of number of syllables.

(I've had in mind for some time that [i] sequences maybe relate to some kind of prosodic variation and that the differences between [y, an, ain, aiin, aiiin] might be much more subjective to the speaker than being strictly different words. This is what we tend to see them at the end of words rather than internally, and why they prefer words of a certain length. But it's a difficult idea to form and test and could be totally wrong.)

As for [ch, sh], this is where I'm most unsure. I do think that they are acting like vowels (or at least like [a, y, o]) but I know that having discussed this with Marco in the past the evidence is not conclusive. But the possibility of the length of [e] sequences showing that [ch, sh] might incorporate an [e] means that the whole "[y] deletion" hypothesis is the same for [e] and [ch, sh]. We see the same thing with [ckh, cth, cfh, cph], in that they both shorten [e] sequences and are proportionately more likely to be followed immediately by [d].