26-09-2016, 11:40 AM
Quote:Anyway, I don't dispute that y does in fact behave like o in many cases. But I think it also behaves as a consonant in other ways. Basically it seems to have a role in two separate subsystems of the script, if that makes sense.
Maybe this will make it clear what I'm getting at:
or ar
os es
ol al
oy ey
Basically it seems that l is to y as r is to s, both in terms of where these letters may and may not occur (at least with respect to when they follow vowels), and in terms of the shapes of the letters themselves. Now, I know that these shapes are borrowed from (abbreviated) Latin, and in Latin the similarities between these shapes are coincidental, as they are not related to one another. But in Voynichese they're clearly not coincidental - whoever devised the script selected letters such that their shapes would relate to the role the letters play in words and so that the script would have this kind of symmetry and structure in it.
I don't feel comfortable throwing this kind of information away, and in fact in my mind it takes precedence over ideas from linguistic theory. But there's not necessarily a contradiction. If on the one hand y sometimes behaves like o and on the other hand it's part of a system with other letters that seem to be consonants, then one explanation could be that it's a syllabic consonant. Another explanation, and perhaps a better one, is that y is simply representing two entirely different sounds (one a vowel and one a consonant). Maybe there are other possibilities. I admit that I've found it a bit puzzling.
I don't believe that character shapes are entirely incidental either. I think that there may be an element of design. So I agree we shouldn't discard that. Where the look of a shape and its statistics bear similarity with another, we have a good observation we need to explain.
We are in agreement that y acts like a vowel (or at least like a and o, which we believe to be vowels) in certain places. We also agree that l is a consonant (whether it can be syllabic is another matter). The core part of our disagreement is that y acts like a consonant, specifically l, in some places.
The two examples you give above, oy and ey, can be paralleled in the behaviour of other vowels and don't need to be explained as y acting like a consonant. Thus:
oy (146 tokens) is parallel to oa (282 tokens) and oo (84 tokens)
ey (4025 tokens) is parallel to ea (448 tokens) and eo (3454 tokens)