The Voynich Manuscript: Understanding the Untranslatable with Lisa Fagin Davis

[MarcoP]

4. Davis further argues that "there's a linguist who's doing work trying to figure out which are the vowels and which are the consonants." However, Guy (1991) and Reddy & Knight (2011) both attempted vowel-consonant separation and found it does not work.

I don’t think that Guy found that vowel-consonant separation did not work. This is what he wrote in “Statistical properties of two folios of the Voynich manuscript” (1991). Of course, one can disagree with his conclusions.

Sukhotin's algorithm identified ( c), ( C) (i.e. (cc)), (o), (g), (a) and (i) [EVA:e ee o y a i - e ee o y a i] as representing vowels in both transcription systems used here.
First, (o) and (a) of the Voynich manuscript are similar to the corresponding vowels of our modern scripts.
Second, the Spanish script known as "Visigothic" and the Italian script known as "Beneventan" or "Beneventine"', both in use from the VIIth to the XIlIth century, are characterised by a form of 't' identical to the group (ct) [ch] in the Voynich manuscript, identified as a consonant by Sukhotin's algorithm.
Third, that same Visigothic script has a form of 'a' very similar to the Voynich (cc) [ee] sequence, identified as a vowel; while the 'a' of Beneventan resembles a ‘c' or an 'o' fused to a following 'c'. Irish and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of the same period exhibit both forms of 'a' (open, as in Visigothic, and closed as in Beneventan) along with forms like our modern cursive small 'a'.
Unless these are mere coincidences, they suggest that the Voynich manuscript either is of medieval origin, probably from Italy or Spain, or is a later forgery by someone with a knowledge of medieval palaeography.