Curve-Line System - Bluetoes edition

[pfeaster]

I thought l/y pairing was already included at least in pfeaster's summary of the curve-line system? I don't remember the history of curve-line systems very well, but I think I remember l/y mentioned somewhere.

The pairing of [l] and [y] comes up in Michael Winkelmann’s You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (2008), Brian Cham's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (2014/5), and my own You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (2020).  I believe we each came up with it independently, which may weigh in its favor.

Along with the obvious similarities, there's also a difference among "curve-line" hypotheses that may be worth pointing out.   

Winkelmann writes in terms of Harmoniegesetze or "laws of harmony" that govern the order of discrete glyphs depending on whether they belong to what he calls the e-class or the i-class.  Cham writes similarly of constraints on the order of discrete glyphs based on whether their "base shape" is a "curve" or a "line."

My own suspicion is that Voynichese is built on a frame of hatchmarks (made up of bare "curves" and bare "lines") that are punctuated or augmented with flourishes ("tails" and "loops" and such).  The idea is that there's not a discrete glyph [r] that prefers to come after [i] as [ir], and a discrete glyph [s] that prefers to come after [e] as [es]; rather, the composite forms transcribed as [r] and [s] happen to occur when the same flourish is added to the second hatchmark in a sequence [ii] or [ee].  In other words, I think it's probably not so much that similar glyphs "prefer" to appear next to each other, but rather that the forms we usually treat as "glyphs" don't correspond to the building blocks of Voynichese in the first place.  I see that Anton proposes much the same idea in a comment from 2015 at the end of Brian's article, referring to it as "superimposition."

So I'd suggest there are really two competing hypotheses here:

1. One treating curves and lines as parts of unitary glyphs (e.g. Winkelmann, Cham, Bluetoes)
2. One treating curves and lines as separable elements (e.g., Alipov, Feaster)