Voynichese Phonotactics

[Emma May Smith]

It seems to me that there are at least two different possible explanations for certain characters being rare at the end of words:

1. the corresponding sounds are not allowed at the end of syllables (phonetic explanation)
   
2. the corresponding sounds are not part of common suffixes (morphological/lexical explanation)
   

In the other thread, I made the example of n and m in Latin. They have similar phonetic behavior, but very different word ending statistics (because noun and verb suffixes often end with -m and very rarely with -n).

How can we understand which would be the better explanation for what we observe in Voynichese?

You are right, Marco. Any observation we make could have more than one explanation. The answer is to make more observations! An analysis would need to gather as many observations as possible and build a theory which explains them all without contradicting itself.

A useful distinction can be made between frequency and validity. We can suppose that anything which happens frequently is valid, but that not all valid things are frequent and not all infrequent things are invalid. So some observable features may not happen often but they are well within the normal rules of the language. We can accept that Latin words do not often end with /n/, but some which do, such as 'in', 'non', 'nomen', and 'semen', are all core words.

My initial argument for the point in question would be that all gallows characters are somehow related and none appear often at the end of words. There are no clear examples of this kind of character validly appearing in that position: in all cases the numbers are low and so are the rates (I think f is the highest at 3.5% final). Also, there are ways of syllabifying Voynich words which puts gallows into the onset rather than the coda of syllables, even if the gallows is in a middle position. This would suggest that there is a general rule forbidding certain sounds at the end of syllables. The exceptions may stem from reading/writing errors and loanwords, though it is possible that some rare but valid words might exist.