07-03-2025, 10:31 PM
You seem to have gotten here through one of my videos 
The "13 letters" was not really meant as a definitive solution. My idea was that if you treat the MS as a substitution cipher, you'd get about 13 full letter equivalents out of it, give or take. But I know several researchers here who aren't too keen on that approach.
But I see what you mean with your question. First we'd solve some oddities by assuming positional variation. This would actually not remove too much information from the text. Then we introduce variation by assuming certain of these new letters actually stand for several sounds.
The first issue I see with this is that it would be a headache to test, because you'd be stacking assumptions. First you'd assume positional variation is at play. Then you'd need to guess which glyphs are each other's positional variants. And then you'd have to take that as the basis for a flexible solution.
The "13 letters" was not really meant as a definitive solution. My idea was that if you treat the MS as a substitution cipher, you'd get about 13 full letter equivalents out of it, give or take. But I know several researchers here who aren't too keen on that approach.
But I see what you mean with your question. First we'd solve some oddities by assuming positional variation. This would actually not remove too much information from the text. Then we introduce variation by assuming certain of these new letters actually stand for several sounds.
The first issue I see with this is that it would be a headache to test, because you'd be stacking assumptions. First you'd assume positional variation is at play. Then you'd need to guess which glyphs are each other's positional variants. And then you'd have to take that as the basis for a flexible solution.