(31-08-2025, 09:14 AM)Petrasti wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you have an opinion on this?
I'm not sure whether this topic is known with regard to (I call it) "mutations" in general. It is noticeable that the ‘basic words’ if we assume that the letters are prefixes (or whatever without belonging to the base word) are subject to a vowel swap from "o" to "a" or vice versa. Not all words, but too many to ignore this phenomenon.
Are there any theories or topics on this? Is there a language or dialect from the Indo-European branch that has such a vowel exchange?
Couples of similar glyphs are often interchangeable in the Voynich manuscript.
E.g. EVA:k/t ch/sh i/ii e/ee
See figure 1 in Timm and Schinner’s paper.
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In general, similar characters and similar words behave similarly (they tend to appear immediately next to the same characters/words). This of course is different from natural languages, where similar words can behave very differently (e.g. raid/said alter/altar miner/minor). Similar words that do behave similarly in European natural languages often are the result of suffixes (fault/faults mend/mending, many more examples in more inflected languages like German or Latin, but always according to well-defined rules).
About ch/sh and k/t, there’s a great discussion of their position in lines and paragraphs in Patrick Feaster’s 2022 Malta paper You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
For instance, these plots form You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. show that the prefix sh- is slightly more frequent than ch- at line start. For the second word in a line, sh- and ch- have more or less the same frequency. Mid-line, ch- is twice as frequent as sh-. At line end, ch- is almost 4x as frequent as sh-.