Reply to Stolfi's mail inadvertently to me only

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene Zandbergen)]

Dear all,

since Stolfi did not mean to send that recent mail to me instead
of the whole list, I might as well forward  my reply at the same
time.

Cheers, Rene

----------- As of here -------------------------------------

Your last mail was not via the list, correct? The one before
seems also not to have been but I didn't notice then, so I 
replied via the list, which is probably not according to netiquette.

> That may be, but it is not what I meant. I was thinking of sounds that
> are "equivalent" in the sense that swapping one for the other usually
> produces valid *but distinct* words, like p/b in English (pet/bet,
> pill/bill, pun/bun, pay/bay, etc.).

I see.

> Isn't this a characteristic feature of Semitic languages --
> namely, vowels throughout the word are replaced *or omitted*
> to form inflections and derivatives.

With Voynichese I am always having a feeling in the back of my
mind that it is vowelless, so I tend to associate Voynich 
letters with consonants. In fact, the only detachable one which is
a vowel in Eva is 'e' (for what little that may mean).
The reason for this feeling of 'no vowels', is that even if
Sukhotin's algorithm calls a, o and y vowels, it does it with
much lower confidence levels than in normal languages (somewhere
in the old mailign archives). This was also evident in some
plots I once did, looking at character entropies
left and right of given individual characters.
See: www.voynich.nu/latin.gif and (ditto)/currier.gif

>     > "U concete prosím u vístup a nástup ..."  8-)

> Actually I *did* intend to memorize the recording. If I had stayed
> another couple of days, I would have got the second half too...

uconCete prosim vystup a nastup, dveRe zaviraji.

Where dveRe is plural but means 'door' (sing.). 
Capitalised letters have the haCek (which litteraly means 'small
hook').
Another 'funny' word is parek ('small pair') which means
Frankfurter sausage. Indeed a 'small' pair, because you only
get one, not two :-) (that would have made it a Wiener)

> Well, if Voynichese is Czech, its "ortography" must be quite unlike
> the standard one. Perhaps you mean that the soft/hard split affects
> adjacent *sounds* and inflections?

Right now, I wouldn't go further than to consider the possibility
that the VMs writer designed the language with some Czech
patterns in mind. But that's on a pretty small foundation.

> PS.  I have finally scanned some of the pictures I took at Prague:
> http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/00-05-prague-trip/

Nice! It was a nice trip. Note that I also have a picture of
the fish restaurant where Hajek's house used to be. If you want
I can scan it too.
I've also got a few things on Hajek which I'll send to the list.

> PPS. Rene, I noticed that your Geocities URL is now owned
> by someone else.  Shall we assume that you have permanently
> relocated to sunny Niue?

Yes, with backup at www.geocities.com/voynichms

Cheers, Rene