Deconstruction of Voynich Manuscript words

[-JKP-]

No, it won't. It just obfuscates things.

It is not necessary. It is not called for. It is not correct.

Plate is not the same thing as blade unless you are a novelty plate-skater or like eating off of long, skinny, sharp edged, blade-plates.

...

There are manuscripts where p and b are sometimes transposed even if other words are consistent with local spellings. This happens when English speakers try to speak Korean, as well. Depending on the region, there is a sound in Korean which is in between b and p and which English speakers often assume is one or the other and thus pronounce with an accent. Or take the German word for Capricorn the goat, which is spelled Steinbock but in 15th century manuscripts is sometimes written steinpock or sometimes stainbock or stainpock. Even when the writer swaps p for b, it doesn't mean all the p words were changed to b (or vice versa) because some words, depending on the sounds around them, might sound more like a p or a b to the listener and thus be written "correctly" for the region.

Yiddish has many examples of sound transpositions, as well, where the German word is closely or loosely substituted with something adapted from Hebrew either due to Hebrew grammatical construction or due to what may have been a medieval immigré's unfamiliarity with certain sounds in a new region. In German, thank you is danke shön. In Yiddish, it's dank a sheyn (a sheynem dank). A similar example is German ein which was sometimes written (and was probably pronounced) ain.


We don't know to what extent substitutions might be present in the VMS, but we have to stay open to the possibility that if it's a natural language (or a formulaic cipher of a natural language), it might be nonnative to the writer and sound transpositions (maybe even inconsistent ones) may have been applied. It's also possible that the VMS author made up letters to represent sounds that didn't exist in the local language where the manuscript was created.