Syllabic Hypothesis

[pfeaster]

• Every word (or most) must contain a vowel, which means that a there will be a single set of glyphs which occurs in most words. This is actually true, but these are the single glyphs [o, y] rather than a set of glyph groups. Moreover, these same glyphs are also those which can appear 1) multiple times in a word, and 2) discontinuously. A syllable cannot have more than one nucleus and the whole nucleus needs to be continuous.
  
  

Thanks for this and for your other good points.  You've laid out an objection we might call the "vowel problem" very well and very usefully.  I'm not sure it's entirely insoluble, but it's certainly important to address.

I've suggested that each "vord" could represent a V, CV, VC, or CVC structure, but it doesn't necessarily follow that its component glyphs can be neatly divided up into those parts.  If we're looking at a cryptographic solution, I suppose the connection between the form of a "vord" and its value could even be wholly arbitrary.  But that seems unlikely: the existence of line-start, line-end, and word-break patterns seems to point towards the component parts of a "vord" being individually significant and meaningfully ordered.  The hypothesis I've laid out assumes that the leftmost part of a "vord" represents the onset of a syllable and that the rightmost part represents the coda, and if that isn't the case, there wouldn't be much left of the hypothesis itself.

That said, it seems to me that the encoding of the nucleus could conceivably take many different forms.

One advantage of a syllabic encoding system with different encodings for onset and coda is that the structure of a syllable would be easy to determine even if its vowel weren't explicitly written.  Whether anyone in the fifteenth century would have recognized this advantage or not is an open question, but a number of nineteenth-century shorthand systems tried to make use of it to a greater or lesser extent.  Here, for example, is a passage from the introduction to Alexander Melville Bell's Steno-Phonography (1852):

It is confidently asserted that the principle of articulate notation, which forms a distinctive feature in this Steno-phonography, is a source of such absolute accuracy, simplicity, and brevity, as along place this system above any that has yet appeared.  ARTICULATIONS (or Consonants) ARE WRITTEN FULL SIZE ONLY WHEN A VOWEL PRECEDES THEM.  This principle is perfect in its analogy to speech.  And as it informs the eye with exactitude where vowels do, and where they do not occur, it renders the writing of vowels, except when final or double, altogether unnecessary in ordinary Short-hand.  It gives such a distinctiveness of outline to almost every word, that without vowel marks, and independently of context, the mind is enabled to fix at once on the precise word intended, without the memory being burdened with lists of arbitrary logograms.

To give a concrete example, [snt] could be read any number of ways, but if we represent the position of a nucleus by *, it's more easily disambiguated.  If the language is English, we might have [s*nt] = sent, [sn*t] = snit or snot, [*s*nt] = isn't, [s*nt*] = Santa, Sinti, etc.  According to the syllabic hypothesis I described, Voynichese would have enjoyed this same advantage.  That's not to say it would necessarily have omitted vowels.  But it might have recognized an implicit default vowel, like Brahmic scripts, in which case the majority of "vords" might not contain any glyph representing a vowel, even if some do.  Alternatively, CV and/or VC combinations might have been encoded together as units in some way that makes distinct vowel graphemes difficult or impossible to isolate.  Some such arrangement could perhaps free up those middle glyphs to modify the onset and/or coda of a syllable rather than requiring them to specify a nucleus.

This would be an added complication, and I'll admit that any hypothesis grows less plausible with each added complication.  But if the possibilities I've suggested don't seem too far-fetched, they might help salvage what I consider the more attractive implications of the hypothesis -- the potential explanations for line-start and line-end anomalies, word-break patterns, repetitions of similar-looking words, and so on.