Phonology of Voynichese

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: 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.

Marco, you are right that my characterization of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was too strong. Guy did find a separation using the Sukhotin algorithm and interpreted it positively.

Sukhotin's algorithm simply tries to divide the set of symbols into two subsets A and B so that the frequency of AB and BA digraphs is maximized.   

Intuitively we expect that, when applied to polysyllabic languages in a reasonably phonetic script the smaller set will often be the vowels V and the larger one the consonants C.  

The justification is that, in those texts, the two sets tend to alternate:, a C is much more likely to be followed by a V than by another C, and likewise a V is much more likely to be followed by C.  And experiments generally confirm that intuition.  

However, Sukhotin's algorithm it will always produce some partition A:B of the alphabet.  If the conditions above are not satisfied, the result can be meaningless.  

Jacques Guy ran the algorithm on Voynichese text, and he did report the the results in that paper assuming that they were meaningful.  But the conditions do not seem to be satisfied: either the text is encrypted in a complex way (that is not a simple phoneme-to-glyph mapping) or the language is monosyllabic, with a partition of the alphabet into several different classes (not just two), that do not alternate but rather occur in a "multiple-slot" fashion.

I wrote that "Guy unsuccessfully tried Sukhotin's algorithm", in spite of his positive report, because those results led nowhere.  AFAIK, not even he got anything significant out of them.  And, if I understood You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. correctly, he later came to accept the "Chinese" hypothesis as a valid possibility.

All the best, -- stolfi