I am aware that positional rules exist. I know some Korean and Japanese, and a tiny bit of Chinese. But we must look at the BIG PICTURE. The positional restraints of natural languages are SIGNIFICANTLY less than VMS tokens. Enough to call them apples and oranges.

I am not sure now what is meant or applies.
In some areas (especially Berne) they speak "ich auch" as "ig o". In some villages they also leave out the g.  Then only i o = ich auch. I too
So with us eu = you

(10-02-2021, 10:57 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The positional restraints of natural languages are SIGNIFICANTLY less than VMS tokens.

Again, while I do not believe that it is relevant for the Voynich MS, this is not correct. At least the syllable structure of Mandarin Chinese, which is tabulated here:
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is in fact simpler and more rigid than that of Voynichese (compare with Stolfi's "word grammar").
It is not possible to set up such a simple table for Voynichese.

(It is to be noted that the tones are not indicated in the wikipedia table, allowing for one more degree of freedom. I am not aware of any restrictions on possible tones per syllable.)

I grabbed these common words (transliterated) very quickly and they are technically not alphabetic, I rough-ordered them to make it easier for English readers to glance through them.

ba
bùshì
chá
chāojí
chéngxù
chuáng
cóng
diànyǐngyuàn
duōshǎo
fángjiān
gān
gāoxìng
gōngzuò
hǎo
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Helvetica]hǎoyìsi[/font][/font]
hòu
jǐngchá
jiàndào
jīnnián
jīròu
jīntiān
jú
kàn
kèqi
le
láizì
lǎoshī
méiguānxi
míngbái
míngtiān
nán
ni
nǐmen
píjiǔ
qián
Qǐngwèn
rén
sānshíwǔ
shèjìyuán
shìchǎng
shāngdiàn
shénme
shuǐ
shūcài
shíjiān
tīng
tuīxiāoyuán
wǎn'ān
xiāng
wǒzaì
wǒ
Xièxiè
yìsi
yuángōng
yóuzhèngjú
yú
zàijiàn
zhīdào
zuò
zuòjiā



Chinese is syllabic, so it's not typical to find vowels at the beginning of words, but even with this significant restriction, look how much variety there is at the beginning of words and how the other letters move around within words much more than glyphs in the VMS. Also, like English and other European languages, you don't see three or four of the same letters in a row as one sees glyphs in the VMS.

In the VMS, there are about 15 or 16 glyphs typically found at the beginnings of tokens (the number depends on how much weight you want to give rare and extremely rare glyphs).

P.S. To moderators... do we have a thread for positionality in VMS glyphs? I can't remember.

Most of these words are composites.
They are two or three syllables long.
This is easily checked with the list of syllables in the link I provided.

Each syllable is written with a separate character, and each syllable is a word or concept by itself. (There are some suffixes that may not have a clear meaning and could not be used stand-alone).

For example: jīnnián
is written: 今年
and means "this year".


This is a case where the composite is also two words in most other languages.

The example: míngtiān
means "next day", or in a single word: tomorrow.

Not long ago, it was realised (here in this forum) that the Voynich word structure still allows for a high number of anagrams. This surprising result has not been further investigated or clarified yet, as far as I know. This is almost impossible for Chinese (when written in PinYin).

Regarding the position of qo, why is that a problem? Why can't it be an initial form of another letter? 
Much as aiin could somewhat plausibly be a final form of a.

This is possible, but it would limit your solutions to ones that require a small amount of glyphs. The VM's alphabet size is already limited, and with this you would remove a bunch more.

(17-01-2022, 11:16 AM)ddskbnbn Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Regarding the position of qo, why is that a problem? Why can't it be an initial form of another letter? 
Much as aiin could somewhat plausibly be a final form of a.

The reason why qo is a problem is that qo should be read as po. Slovenian language does not use letter Q. PO is one of the most frequently used Slovenian prefixes, meaning complete action. It can be prefixed to nouns, verbs, adjectives. The alternative prefix that could be used with the same root words is O, which is often found in the VM. Besides a prefix, PO can also be a part of the word, such as POT (path, road), also frequently used in the VM, as well as POJ (POY) - sing, POL - half. PO is also Slovenian preposition, meaning 'on', 'at', by'. 
This accounts for such high frequency of the PO words in the VM.

(17-01-2022, 12:56 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is possible, but it would limit your solutions to ones that require a small amount of glyphs. The VM's alphabet size is already limited, and with this you would remove a bunch more.

No it wouldn't? There's still plenty of symbols. 
And to be clear, I said two of the them might have different forms, not all. 
(Edit: Well, technically it could be just one letter with three forms: qo, a, aiin.)


But let's assume there aren't enough by whatever standard..

1). Could be an abjad. Like Syriac or Arabic, incidentally two scripts where letters have positional forms. 

2) Could be defective. Book Pahlavi was a ten symbol script with several sounds per.

3) Could have a lot of digraphs. Seems unlikely considering the generally short word length though.

Combine 1&2 for a real nightmare. But you know, that would drive down the entropy.