The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I suspect that y a o denote pitch levels.  In that case, yp would be a syllable with a single phoneme, like wú, yì, or é in modern Mandarin, while ChoCPheosaiin would be a syllable with four or five phonemes Ch + CPhe + s + iin , like Mandarin chuāng  (IPA /⁵ʈʂʰwaŋ⁵/).

If this is the case, then I am quite confused

Well, I am still confused too.  If I knew exactly what each glyph stands for, I would have posted it.  Those that I offered (including the list of 21 "letters") are just hunches.

o seems to be it's own thing, on f7r, we see it word initially on Line 3, Word 1, oeeees, it seems to me by your logic, this would change the tone of e

The hunch is that the "circle" glyphs { o a y } indicate pitch levels; say, low, mid, and high.  Then the tone of a syllable can be encoded by a sequence of pitch levels.  

For example, the IPA representation of pinyin zhǔ can be [ʈʂu˨˩˦], using a Mandarin-specific tone mark "˨˩˦",  or ʈʂu²¹⁴], using more language-independent pitch codes "²¹⁴".  This second method is used, for example, when comparing languages with different tone sets. 

The tone is a feature of the syllable as a whole, not of a specific vowel. Thus, when a syllable has two or more vowels, the placement of the tone diacritic in pinyin is rather arbitrary; the pinyin standard must explicitly say which vowel gets it. The same is true for the pitch-based encoding, except that there is no standard.  Thus one could write the IPA of zhǔ also as [²¹⁴ʈʂu], [²¹ʈʂu⁴], [²ʈʂ¹u⁴], etc; all these would mean the same sound.

So oeeees could mean the phonemes ee + ee, starting with a (say) low pitch.  Maybe that would mean that the entire syllable is in a flat low-pitch tone; or, if the next word starts with y, it could implicitly mean a rising tone, from low to high.

Or it may be something else entirely. 

One interesting bit is that,by my statistics, there are practically no words that have more than three "circle" glyphs. 

we also see o as the second letter of a word on Line 4, Word 1, qokCho ...  q only follows o, but as you said, o is a pitch marker, so what is q at all?

By "follows" you mean "precedes".  Yes, qo essentially behaves like a unit.  I have some vague clues that qo is a non-phonetic symbol that means "and". It would be like our "&" but with a grammar more like that of Arabic "wa-".  That, in order to say "water, fire, earth, and beer" one would write "water qofire qoearth qobeer".

But, again, this is still only a hunch.  I would not bet a pizza and a beer on it. Yet.

All the best, --stolfi

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"ch" that look like platform gallows

The gallows spelling of h does not mean that it is a copy of a gallows.

I was not referring to the EVA encoding. I meant that a partially erased Voynichese CTh can look like a partly erased Latin "ch" in that hypothetical old handwriting.

All the best,--stolfi