Thoughts on [m, g] as [in, ain]? (Stolfi)

[pfeaster]

Patrick: I agree with your points apart from the first one. There I strongly disagree I don't see the point in having an extra glyph if it behaves like eva-m. We might be getting closer to understanding the system if we figure out what m may be equivalent to. Whatever role m may be assigned in a solution cannot be that of a full letter in the first place, so it is already not a stand-alone part of the alphabet. Or am I missing something?

I suppose it depends on what the overall encoding scheme is.  It's hard to imagine [m] functioning in a simple substitution cipher as anything but a null, abbreviation, hyphenation, punctuation, or ornamentation.  But if the script works in some other way, I could imagine [m] serving a real purpose linked to some situation that happens to occur mostly at the ends of lines -- something beyond just marking or embellishing them.

Let's imagine just for the sake of argument that Voynichese is designed to encode text in blocks of two plaintext letters, and that plaintext words are never split across line boundaries or image intrusions.  If the quantity of plaintext characters in a line (or before an image intrusion) is even, there's no problem.  But if it's odd, there will be a single character left over at the end of the string that needs to be encoded separately by itself.  The special loop that forms [m] and [g] could then be a way of indicating that a block contains an empty second slot.

I don't mean that as a particularly serious proposal in itself -- just as one example of a type of explanation.  But to turn your statement around: it seems to me we might also be getting closer to understanding the system if we can figure out a plausible scenario in which [m] could serve a unique and meaningful purpose in spite of its weird distribution.