Classical astrology in the text of the Voynich zodiac?

[-JKP-]

More lengthy answer: Chinese and Egyptian use modifiers because their scripts are not as phonetic as a plain alphabet. Chinese adds modifying characters that "help" you figure out the pronunciation of a word:

女 = nǚ (woman)
馬 = mā (horse)
媽 = mǎ (mother - the "馬" has been added to the woman character "女" to modify its pronunciation)
...

I don't want to nitpick, but I would like it be correct for the record... it's the character on the left that has been "added" in the modifier sense. In both Chinese and Japanese (which inherited the Kanji characters from Chinese) the radical (the "modifier") is on the left—the base concept on the right. And one doesn't have to specifically refer to pronunciation. One can read Chinese without knowing a single thing about the spoken language or how it sounds, and there are many different mutually unintelligible dialects of Chinese that use the same character set. The inability to understand the spoken language while still being able to intercommunicate through writing, as happens in China, is relevant because the VMS text may be a constructed language, in which case there may not be any associated sounds.

Since I'm the one who typically refers to some of the VMS characters as possible modifiers (it's a term I've been using for years), I'd like to point out that I mean "modifiers" in the broad sense. Radicals (modifiers) in Chinese are just one example. The modifier can work in slightly different ways in other languages (changing gender from male to female, changing a noun into an adjective, changing singular to plural). Chinese uses radicals (or sometimes doubling of characters), some of the other Asian languages use position, some languages use characters (as we use "s" to create plurals), some use marks (e.g., dots, lines), and some use subtle adjustments of the shape of the character (not uncommon in Malaysian scripts).

In Korean, there's a grammatical construction we don't have in English, representing a "topic" marker, so you can sort out what is being spoken about in the sentence (the grammar is quite different from English). If the context is obvious, they sometimes leave out the topic marker, so it may not even be consistently applied. Perhaps the VMS text has modifiers or markers different from those that are common to most languages.


We don't know whether there are modifiers in the VMS (beyond possible grammatical modifiers that are common to many languages), but we have to keep open to the possibility and I suspect that there might be, based on the frequency and positional characteristics of some of the glyphs.