Voynichese: a forgotten turkic-aramaic-persian language?

[Emma May Smith]

About your transcription system: one problem, which it shares with many other proposed solutions, is that gallows represent certain important sounds that are not represented in another way. This seems logical, but given the fact that gallows (and indeed many other glyphs) only occur in certain positions, it complicates things. Are there really languages where "t" and "k" only occur at the beginning of words, like gallows do?

Gallows don't only occur at the beginning of words, but in the middle too. The simply don't occur (often) at the end of words. It's pretty common for languages to restrict certain (or even all) consonants from the end of syllables.

Indeed, the fact that [r, l, d, s,] often occur in these positions but [k, t, ch, sh] don't is probably linguistically relevant. As languages have a tendency to restrict sounds in this position based on a hierarchy, we can guess what some of these sounds are and are not.