Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript

[RenegadeHealer]

They transcribe [iin] as /m/. The glyph(s) [iin] are almost always found word final and never word initial. While Turkic has few word initial /m/ (depending on the branch), I would be interested to learn if any language has it solely word final (or even coda only)

Yes, or word-medial.

This basically sums up my feelings about every substitution "solution" that I've seen: Solvers don't seem to consider the discrepancy between VMS glyph positions and [language of their choice] letter positions.

JKP and Emma, this is why I originally considered Basque a viable candidate for the underlying language of the VMs. Gavin Guldenpfennig inspired me to look into this possibility, and I was excited to learn that at least in proto-Basque phonology, consonants were very positionally rigid. (Source: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). I was also encouraged by the fact that at the time of the VMS's composition, Basque was unwritten, and several learned travelers from central Europe visited and wrote about their experiences among the Basque people in the middle ages. Could the VMS be a German merchant or missionary's attempt to take dictation from a Basque tribal elder, about his people's mythology? A language isolate with no familiar word roots could have been the inspiration to use a whole new character set.

I felt like a proper mad scientist one day — full of a kind of manic energy I've only felt a few times in my life — putting together a table matching Voynichese characters to the relatively small number of possible proto-Basque consonants, broken down by word position. (I still have it somewhere, and can scan it and upload it if anyone's interested.) My excitement dampened quite a bit when none of the correspondences I worked out produced any common Basque words. I also looked extensively at pagan Basque mythology and folklore, and didn't see any common themes in the imagery of the VMs. Oh well.