(28-09-2016, 11:38 AM)MarcoP wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
So I would say that positional flexibility is in some cases limited both in the VMS and in Latin manuscripts.
I absolutely agree that positional flexibility is limited in Latin manuscripts, but this restriction applies mainly to the Latin abbreviations rather than the position of the letters themselves. Individual letters can be found in almost any position, and not every word in Latin (or other languages) is abbreviated. There is much greater variation than in the VMS.
If only the beginnings and endings were positionally restricted in the VMS, then it would be patterned similar to Latin and other languages that use beginning/end abbreviation conventions and midword variation would resemble natural-language patterns more closely.
But the VMS is unusually strict in how within-word glyphs are positioned as well, far beyond the way it occurs in most languages. This rigidity is not common and is difficult to explain in terms of natural language patterns unless (and there will always be this "unless") the spaces are contrived. If the spaces are contrived then the positional rigidity significantly diminishes. If the spaces are not contrived, then the patterns and glyph positions are more systematic than natural.
At one point about three years ago, I charted letter-position in about 40 different languages and compared them to the VMS and none of them were as positionally rigid as the VMS, even when allowing for the possibility that some of the glyphs that resemble Latin abbreviation symbols in the VMS might also be abbreviations in Voynichese. There were only a handful of languages that behaved in a similar way, mostly Asian, Turkic (I'm using that word generically in the broad sense since migrations established some of the language characteristics in other areas), and some African languages.
The only way I could find commonalities with Latin and other western languages was by ignoring spaces and allowing glyph-combinations to represent more than one abbreviation and even then, the within-word rigidity was still more than one would expect from western languages.
(28-09-2016, 05:55 PM)ThomasCoon wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
I hope this will illustrate why I believe there are 2-letter combinations in the Voynich Manuscript.
I do too. I have for a long time.
The problem is that not all the glyphs appear to follow this pattern. It looks like monoglyphs, diglyphs, and possibly even some triglyphs may all have been used, and it also appears as if some of the diglyphs might function as monoglyphs in certain positions (the "o" being one example). I've been wrestling with unsnarling this alphabet soup and it hasn't been easy.