17-04-2021, 06:22 PM
I thought that my idea of a lipogrammatic text without any of the letters ABC was about as extreme as a lipogram could possibly get, but now another idea has occurred to me along the same lines, and it may suggest a lipogrammatic text even more extreme than that:
If the ms is a product of an adherent of the English House of York, whose fierce rival was the House of Lancaster, then a lipogram excluding letters from the start of the alphabet such as A and C might indeed make sense. All the more so because York begins with a letter near the very end of the alphabet.
The more extreme version would be a lipogram that excludes all of the letters LANC from the text! Now this would invalidate the whole [qokedy qokeedy] = "nece neece" idea, but it would not necessarily affect the [otol] = "fous" idea. It would also explain even more of the problems we have recognizing words and grammatical endings of words, since the exclusion of "N" would change the appearance of many grammatical suffixes and other word endings significantly. It would also exclude all normal means of expressing negation in English!
To be sure, my provisional Voynich character : Middle English letter correspondence table would need to be amended in the case of a "no LANC" lipogrammatic text. But again, [otol] = "fous" and in fact all of the Middle English function words I proposed so far in the "problematic...Germanic" thread would not necessarily be affected by this adjustment. The only other word in my current hypothesis that would need to be changed is [qokaiin] / [qokain] = "no".
In general, the exclusion of more letters makes it more plausible to assign all remaining letters to Voynich characters or character combinations.
If the ms is a product of an adherent of the English House of York, whose fierce rival was the House of Lancaster, then a lipogram excluding letters from the start of the alphabet such as A and C might indeed make sense. All the more so because York begins with a letter near the very end of the alphabet.
The more extreme version would be a lipogram that excludes all of the letters LANC from the text! Now this would invalidate the whole [qokedy qokeedy] = "nece neece" idea, but it would not necessarily affect the [otol] = "fous" idea. It would also explain even more of the problems we have recognizing words and grammatical endings of words, since the exclusion of "N" would change the appearance of many grammatical suffixes and other word endings significantly. It would also exclude all normal means of expressing negation in English!
To be sure, my provisional Voynich character : Middle English letter correspondence table would need to be amended in the case of a "no LANC" lipogrammatic text. But again, [otol] = "fous" and in fact all of the Middle English function words I proposed so far in the "problematic...Germanic" thread would not necessarily be affected by this adjustment. The only other word in my current hypothesis that would need to be changed is [qokaiin] / [qokain] = "no".
In general, the exclusion of more letters makes it more plausible to assign all remaining letters to Voynich characters or character combinations.