Most Common Use of Nulls in 15th Century Cipher Text

[geoffreycaveney]

I appreciate Michelle's kicking off this thread and all the interesting comments. I would like to add one thought here, which may point more toward the way that I am thinking about the role of the glyph [y] right now:

Just for a moment, rather than thinking of late medieval European languages, let's take an example that's right under our noses: modern English. Eventually, two or three millennia in the future, it is likely that English will no longer be a global lingua franca, and its complicated pronunciation and spelling that we all take for granted today, will appear exceedingly strange to those future scholars who wish to study ancient 20th and 21st century English documents, and especially so for those brave future souls who wish to pronounce written 20th-21st century English correctly! 

In the future when English as we know it today has been a dead language for a millennium or more, the final "silent e" will confuse many students of this strange language. Just look at how many such final silent e's I have written in the previous sentence and in the last paragraph. Is it really necessarily so different as a symbol than Voynich final [y]? If Emma is on the right track about the equivalence of [a] and [y], then the similarity becomes even more striking. (Those who are still reading my West Slavic thread have seen that I found some examples of a possible [a]~[y] equivalence there, although it does not hold universally in my theory.) 

For the most part, yes, in English one could make a simple rule that final "e" is silent and initial/medial "e" is pronounced as some vowel sound or other. But how many exceptions and nuanced adjustments it is necessary to make to this rule! First of all, in the very most frequent word in the entire language, there is a final "e" and it is not silent! Then we have "be" and "we" to account for. I have used all of these words in this post without making any particular effort to do so whatsoever. 

The complications add up when one has to consider "language" vs. "languages" (silent "e" vs. vocalic "e"), but also "one" and "ones" (both silent "e"), and for an even more complicated case, consider "pronounce" vs. "pronounces" vs. "pronounced" (silent "e", vocalic "e", and silent "e" again).

Imagine for a moment if a scholar only had evidence of English (say 18th-21st century English) written purely phonemically, and then came across documents written in our actual English spelling. Imagine the contorted efforts that would be necessary to decipher the role of our final silent "e"! I imagine it might not be so very different from our discussion of the role of final [y] in the Voynich ms text. It would be very natural to treat English final "e" as a phonemic null in a large proportion of cases, although this only sometimes actually captures its true role. 

In reality the only entirely accurate explanation would require a deep knowledge of the history of both spoken and written English going back to the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century and the ensuing standardization of word spellings that effectively froze the development of the written language while the spoken language continued to change dramatically for centuries. In the absence of this knowledge of six centuries of the history of spoken and written English, it would be virtually impossible to provide a complete and correct explanation for the final silent "e". Cryptographic analysis, in the absence of historical linguistic knowledge, could not possibly explain the role of this letter completely and accurately. 

This is just an example to keep in mind as we discuss and analyze the role of a glyph such as final [y] in the Voynich ms text.