Voynichese Phonotactics

[Sam G]

Why can ey and eey not be functionally equivalent to eo and eeo?

That's admittedly possible, but eo and eeo are fairly rare as word endings.

I was actually thinking the opposite! Typically, if a language allows a consonant to be syllabic, it should allow all consonants of higher sonority to be syllabic. Liquids are more sonorant than nasals, thus if ch and sh are nasals, then we would expect that whatever represent /r, l/ to be syllabic too.

Well, I did not know that, but it's not a problem if y and l are syllabic consonants representing liquids.

Moreover, ch and sh are often preceded by other characters we might well assume to be consonants. For such strings to be pronounceable liquids work better.

I don't see why this should be true.  The Wikipedia page on syllabic consonants provides counterexamples in English: A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant which either forms a syllable on its own, like the m, n and l in the English words rhythm, button and bottle...  In both "rhythm" and "button" you have a syllabic nasal following a consonant.

Uh oh, we're back to the Chinese theory. It is true that Mandarin Chinese has no syllables with liquid codas, but ones with nasal codas.

Well, I wasn't actually proposing a connection, just pointing out that it is possible for a language to have syllables that begin but not end with /m/.  Thinking about it some more, Hawaiian would have been a better example since in Hawaiian syllables may begin but not end with both /n/ and /m/ (Hawaiian has only open syllables).  And no, I am not suggesting that the VMS is written in Hawaiian.