Syllabic Hypothesis

[ReneZ]

I've been continuing to play around with the idea that some of the strange properties of Voynichese could be explained in terms of the workings of a syllabic encoding scheme.  I decided to try writing up my latest version of this "syllabic hypothesis," not proposing any specific solution (I don't have one), but just outlining the general kind of mechanism I can imagine having been in play.

I've been long attracted to the same idea, and I haven't yet given up on it.
This resulted in an informal 'paper' which is at academia.edu, and which I believe I have also summarised here.

I 'cheated'  in a sense, in that I used a plain text in Italian rather than Latin. Italian has a much cleaner split of the text in vowels and consonants, and it was relatively easy to come up with a mapping of Voynichese 'clusters'  into vowels and consonants.

This had a few very interesting results:
1) It became possible to map Italian to realistic-looking Voynichese and back
2) The same transformation allowed (with a few minor tweaks) to turn real Voynichese into a string of characters with a reasonable vowel-consonant alternation
3) The transformation in step 2 converted the bigram entropy of Voynichese to a completely normal value.

As expected, however, this text was a completely meaningless string.

The selected mapping beween Voynichese and Italian was rather arbitrary, and I am still interested in improving on this.