Voynichese Phonotactics

[farmerjohn]

Koen Gh.Emma

I've read a couple of your posts but only after I had made up my mind about what could ne known about the language. I was especially fond of the one comparing a and 9, because I personally believe they are the same sound written differently depending on posotion. In fact Diane recommended your blog when I was talking about these things.

I studied linguistics at university but never learned much about comparative linguistics, which is unfortunately the most relevant discipline at this stage of voynich studies. So I'm glad you're back on the forum

In the VMS, the "a" glyphs are positioned somewhat where you would expect them to be if the "a" and "o" are vowels and the letters around them that look more like consonants are actually consonants.

The EVA-y (the number 9), does not behave this way, however. It behaves exactly as you would expect it to behave if it were the Latin 9-abbreviation glyph. In Latin (and other languages that use Latin abbreviations)—it is found frequently at the ends of words, sometimes at the beginning of words, and occasionally (not often) in the middle of words. In other words, it doesn't behave like a typical vowel and is found at the ends of words much too frequently for most natural languages.


The VMS "alphabet" (if characters are interpreted as approximately one glyph to one letter) is rather lean. Many pages use only about 15 or 16 glyphs. Some glyphs are almost never used. It's difficult to find languages with such a restrained alphabet. Most have at least 20 characters, many have 30 or more characters. Even old italic had 17 characters. If both the "a" and the "9" represent the same letter, it reduces the number of characters even further.

The alphabets that tend to have very constrained alphabets tend to be abjads but if this were an abjad, then one has to consider the possibility that "a" and "o" (and the other glyphs) do not represent vowels. Or that only a few vowels are represented.

The other problem is that the letters don't move around enough. If the spaces are accepted as real, this is a big problem. In most natural languages, the position of letters is much more flexible than it is in the VMS. If the spaces are not real, it partly solves this problem, but then one has to consider the possibility of null characters or, once again, the positional behavior of the glyphs is not typical for natural languages.


Koen wrote: "About vowels, I agree with the ones yoy name. However, I don't think Voynichese is a one-to-one alphabet. For example I think the glyph that looks like c can be a vowel but also an unrelated consonant."


If the "a" and "o" are vowels, then the glyph that resembles a "c" also behaves mostly like a vowel (in terms of position) and it's hard to cast it as a consonant, as well, based on position and frequency. I'm not saying glyphs can't do "double duty" and stand for more than one thing, but I don't think it's the "c" glyph that is the most likely contender, I think it's the "o". The "o" not only is unusually frequent, but positionally it sometimes behaves like a vowel and sometimes like something else (possibly a marker or grammatical modifier).

-JKP-, what does y usually stand for in Latin when it appears in the middle of the word?