The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The first problem is the cross-token dependency around final "y".  In the VMS, the probability that the next token begins with qo
changes strongly depending on the glyphs immediately before the final "y".

First, let me reiterate a general comment: one should not waste time with character (and digraph etc) statistics and correlations, because they are bound to be more confusing than illuminating.  The frequency of a character is mostly the sum of the frequencies of the most common words that use that character; and those words may have vastly different meanings and usage patterns.  It would be like trying to understand sailing by analyzing the shadows of boats on the quay.  Character-based statistics may be useful when one first encounters a new cipher; but that well ran dry more than 50 years ago.

As for the specific features you mention: I have this hunch (still far from certain) that q or qo is not a phonetic glyph like the others, but a symbol that means "and", like English "&", and is used like the "wa-" of Arabic, Namely, to say "benefits the stomach, liver, spleen, and toe" in Voynichese one would write "benefits stomach qoliver qospleen qotoe".  (Whereas in the Chinese of the SBJ one would write just "benefits stomach liver spleen toe".  My hunch is that the Author added the qo on his own because he found that part of the Chinese syntax too confusing.)   Thus, if that hunch is correct, the high frequency of qo after words ending in y may be just a consequence that certain words ending in y happen to be very common in such enumerations.

Another possible explanation would be related to the meaning of the "circle" glyphs { a o y }.  I could not find a convincing place for them in my word structure model, so I just ignored them in my formula

  Q^q D^d X^x G^g H^h X^y D^e N^n

etc.  My model says only that those glyphs may be inserted before, between, and after the other elements; usually at most one per slot,very rarely two.   (But they cannot be inserted within an element -- so okoey or CYhl are not valid words in my model.) 

One possible meaning of those "circle" glyphs is pitch indicators.  A tone is usually not a single pitch but a pattern of how the pitch changes along the syllable, word, or phrase.  (For example, in many European languages the interrogative form of a sentence is like the affirmative form, but with a rising tone at the end, or on the part being questioned.  A raised pitch is also the usual meaning of italics.)  

So an alternative way of indicating tones, that is used by linguists when comparing languages with different tone systems, is to insert pitch codes in the word or sentence.  Thus the pinyin syllable zhǔ  could be encoded as 2zh1u3, to mean that it starts at mid-pitch, drops to low pitch, then rises to high pitch.  

However, in this notation the position of the pitch codes is not fixed; one could also write zh21u3 or zh2u13.  And if a word starts with the same pitch that the previous word ended with, either of the two pitch codes can be omitted. 

Then, if the circle glyphs are indeed pitch codes, the prevalence of y before qo may be because the qo has (say) low pitch, so if the previous word ended with (say) a high pitch, a y would be needed there.  Whereas, if the second word has no qo and started with y, the final y on the previous word could be omitted.

Maybe.  

Standing back, I would note that the phonology and morphology of any natural language is way more complicated than any cryptographic cipher...

All the best, --stolfi