Voynichese Phonotactics

[Sam G]

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.

Actually, unless I'm missing something, it appears that both Cantonese and Swahili have syllabic nasals without having syllabic liquids.  So I'm not sure how rare this situation is after all.

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A terminal can be an approximant consonant, a nasal consonant, or a stop consonant. The approximant /j/ is rounded after rounded vowels.[7] Nasal consonants can occur as base syllables in their own right and these are known as syllabic nasals.

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The nasal stops are pronounced as separate syllables when they appear before a heterorganic plosive (e.g. mtoto /m̩.ˈto.to/ 'child') or represent a separate morpheme (e.g. nilimpiga /ni.li.m̩.ˈpi.ɠa/ 'I hit him'), and prenasalized stops are decomposed into two syllables if the word would otherwise have one syllable: mbwa /ˈm̩.ɓwa/ 'dog', with an implosive b. However, that otherwise does not happen: ndizi ('banana') has two syllables, /ˈⁿdi.zi/, as does nenda /ˈne.ⁿda/ (not */ˈnen.ɗa/) 'go'.

It looks like both of these languages have one liquid consonant each, but I don't see anything about it being syllabic in either case.