As the International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript draws nearer, I suddenly find myself wondering what an oral conversation about research into the text would (or could, or should) sound like.
EVA is often described as "pronounceable," and I see that there's been some discussion of this point, mainly here --
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-- but many of its distinctions would be difficult to pronounce unambiguously, other than by uttering the names of the individual letters. So, for example, I imagine most speakers would tend to pronounce [qo] and [ko] identically, or [dain] and [daiin]. Likewise, [qokedy] and [qokeedy] might sound the same depending on what point of reference one uses for [e] and [ee]. And then there are rare sequences such as [iy], which I think I'd personally tend to pronounce the same as [i] or [y]. Plus, if I say something that sounds like "dee" in English, should I be understood as meaning [d] or [dy]?
By planning ahead, I suppose a presenter could show a word onscreen and indicate it while saying "THIS word" or "THAT word," but that option wouldn't be available to someone in a Q&A session.
Meanwhile, even using the names of EVA letters might be assuming too much about the status of EVA as a standard scheme:
"Notice that both of these words end with 'why' [y]....."
"No, that's a 'nine' [9]!"
"You mean 'gee' [g], don't you?"
"Excuse me, but that's actually *two* glyphs...."
So how have people handled this kind of situation in the past, either in formal presentations or just in informal conversation over coffee or phone?
I could imagine devising a reasonably unambiguous pronunciation of EVA, for example by inserting a glottal stop between adjacent vowels, assigning [q] to /kw/, and so on, but I'm afraid that any unilateral move like that could cause more confusion than it would avert.
Of course EVA doesn't equal Voynichese, and all that. I'm only wondering whether there's any prospect of communicating orally about the text among ourselves as efficiently as EVA lets us communicate about it in writing (no more, no less).