11-03-2025, 07:40 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-03-2025, 08:09 PM by Frigorifico.)
It is well known that some symbols only appear at the end of words, the beginning, or followed or preceded by some specific symbols. This is often used to argue that voynichese can't be a real language because no language behaves this way, but what if these aren't different symbols? What if symbols change shape depending on where they are in the word?
This is something that happens in many real scripts, such as Arabic, Mongolian, Syriac and a few others. Letters have often three or four forms: initial, medial, final and sometimes they also have an isolated form. These shapes are often similar, but they can be quite different in a few cases. This is called "positional allography"
However the reason these scripts have this feature is because they are "cursive" in a way, they are designed so that people need to lift their pen as little as possible when writing, which required letters to "flow" into each other and thus change shape
The voynich script is not like this, so it wouldn't need to behave like this... But what if it does anyway?
What if the Author was exposed to Mongolian or Arabic or whatever and that inspired them to make a script in which letters changed shape depending on their position?
This would reduce the number of letters, but it could increase clarity. Also, we could look at letters that never appear at the end or beginning of words to look for the other shapes of those letters
Thanks for reading!
This is something that happens in many real scripts, such as Arabic, Mongolian, Syriac and a few others. Letters have often three or four forms: initial, medial, final and sometimes they also have an isolated form. These shapes are often similar, but they can be quite different in a few cases. This is called "positional allography"
However the reason these scripts have this feature is because they are "cursive" in a way, they are designed so that people need to lift their pen as little as possible when writing, which required letters to "flow" into each other and thus change shape
The voynich script is not like this, so it wouldn't need to behave like this... But what if it does anyway?
What if the Author was exposed to Mongolian or Arabic or whatever and that inspired them to make a script in which letters changed shape depending on their position?
This would reduce the number of letters, but it could increase clarity. Also, we could look at letters that never appear at the end or beginning of words to look for the other shapes of those letters
Thanks for reading!