RE: Voynichese: a forgotten turkic-aramaic-persian language?
Emma May Smith > 22-09-2016, 01:12 PM
Ok, let's get a little technical.
You can think of a syllable as having three parts:
1) onset: this is everything which comes before a vowel;
2) nucleus: this is the vowel or any sound which acts as a vowel;
3) coda: this is everything which comes after a vowel.
Now, in terms of consonants, these will typically appear in the onset or coda (though they can form the nucleus). Most languages have both a) restrictions on how many consonants can be in an onset or coda, and b) the order in which they appear. Some languages completely forbid clusters—that is, more than one consonant in either onset or coda position—but if they allow more than one they have a tendency to order them in the same way. Basically, certain sounds must be nearer the vowel than others. It's based on a quality known as sonority, but we shan't bother with explaining that except to acknowledge it exists.
There is a tendency to allow onsets to be more complex than codas. Typically all or most consonants can appear there and some clusters are allowed. Codas are more often either empty or have one of a restricted set of consonants, with clusters forbidden. Of course, many languages which flout these rules do exist, for example English, which allows clusters of three consonants in the onset and four in the coda, but it is not typical. (Indeed, Indo-European languages as a whole are typically more complex in their syllable structure than the average language.)
So, when we look at the structure of Voynich words and see that [r, l] are very commonly found at the end but [k, t] are not, what we are observing (ASSUMING the surface patterns are linguistic) is a fact about what the underlying language permits in syllable codas. We can explain this by saying that [r, l] must have some phonological difference to [k, t]. Were you to suggest that [r, l] were nasals and [k, t] plosives, then you would have a similar situation to a number of languages which forbid obstruents but permit sonorants in codas.
Likewise, the observation that [k, t] often appear at or near the beginning of words can be explained in a similar way. If you believe that [k, t] are plosives, then they have low sonority and typically always appear at the beginning of an onset before sounds with a higher sonority (sibilants are sometimes exceptional, so /s/ can appear in places like in English 'skip' and 'stone'). Those strings which appear before [k, t] in Voynich words: [o, qo, cho, che, cheo, etc] can be explained as separate syllables. The task of researchers is then not one of explaining how [k, t] work, but why the syllables within a word are structured as they are.
Sorry if this answer is a bit long-winded, but hopefully it is helpful to thinking about the possible linguistic features of Voynich words. It is my belief that a linguistic analysis, ignoring the origins of the script, the illustrations, and even the potential meaning of the text, could well solve the Voynich manuscript. At the very least it provides us with a framework for assessing both the text and potential solutions.