Gallows bit as a tone marker?

[Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@xxxxxxx>]

I'm very interested in your thoughts on this data about the
constructs of tonal languages as it might relate to the VMS. 
The only tonal language I know is Mandarin, but it has some very
unusal features that I think it may share with other tonal
languages because of their nature.  I use Mandarin Chinese as an
example throughout, not because I am sold on VMS being Mandarin
but because that is the area I have knowledge of.

I've been re-reading all of these e-mails about the gallows
characters and it reminded me of a tonal language.  If you
assumed that the writer was transliterating a language like
Chinese many of the characteristics would match.  The Turkish
model suggested is interesting, but wouldn't the addition of a
'vowel bit' like that tend to be unlikely given the already
short length of Voynich words (assuming the tokens are words)? 
It would seem logical that a bit like the gallows characters
would have to add substantially to the sound value of the
token.  The Turkish model is good in that with the max of one
gallows per token, that would indicate (to me) that there was
only one syllable in each token unless (as in your Turkish
model) the gallows referred to some bit that would be the same
for all syllables of a word.  In methods of Romanization of
Chinese syllables (it's hard to differentiate between a word and
a syllable in Chinese) all have 0 or 1 tone marks and are very
short despite the inclusion of vowels.  The inclusion of the
tone mark makes this possible by effectively making one syllable
into X number of distinct syllables given X number of tones in
the language.

You mentioned long stretches with gallows or no gallows:  There
are several possible explanations for this in a transliteration
of a tonal language.  Among people writing in PinYin (a Chinese
Romanization method) the tones are often left out except where
they are needed to avoid confusion with other possible words
spelled the same way.  Speech is somewhat similar to this. 
Tones will be clearly pronounced at the beginning of a new topic
and then become less obvious.  Within the topic, sentences
usually follow this same pattern as well.  Basically, the 'tone
bit' is extremely important when something new is presented, but
becomes less and less important as context is built.  Also
certain words or phrases are usually spoken with very clear or
even exagerated tones.  Examples of this are specialized terms,
classical expressions and words where there are numerous
homophones.  Students of Chinese have a great deal of trouble
hearing these tones in most words, but when the syllables are
clearly spoken as in the above examples they are very obvious. 
For someone who learned a tonal language just by speaking with
no written or formal training, their transcription wouldn't
necessarily have tone marks with every syllable.  They might
only be consciously aware of the tones of words that had been
emphasized.  Even native Chinese speakers have to make a
conscious effort to think of the tone when they are writing in
this Romanization method.

Another thing about Mandarin is reminiscent of your 'aiin'
problem.  I'm going to assume that this relates to all tonal
languages and is either caused by or causes the use of tones. 
Mandarin is extremely 'sound poor'.  There are a very small
number of possible syllables compared to other languages
(something like 225 if you neglect tones).  The addition of
tones is the only thing that makes it possible to communicate in
a language like Mandarin, and even then it's not uncommon to see
people drawing a character in the air or on their palm to make
themselves understood.  Anyway, point is that every syllable in
Mandarin has three choices, it can end in a vowel, an 'n' or an
'ng'.  Only some of the vowel sounds can begin a syllable and
those aren't nearly as common as words that begin with
consonants.  Some words begin with 'n' and there are none that
begin with 'ng'.  Cantonese has a few more possibilities.  Does
this sort of extreme phonotactic limitation remind you of the 
aiin problem?  

As to the spaces between tokens:  In the PinYin Romanization
methods, where two syllables form a word they are often written
with a space between them anyway to avoid confusion.  That is
why I write PinYin with two capital letters, it's my own
variation that lets me know those two syllables are one word but
lets me distinguish the syllables so I can tell the difference
between XiAn (said Shee-On) and Xian (Shin)and words like that. 
Chinese people write them with the space with the exception of
little grammatical syllables that sometimes get attached, but
these syllables don't have tones that are pronounced in these
instances.  The space between syllables of the same word are an
artifact of the use of characters instead of an alphabet in
Chinese.  Someone who learned Chinese as a second language even
without learning characters would probably do the same because
of the understanding of the syllables as whole units of meaning
amongst themselves and the way that words are sometimes split
across the length of a sentence.  There really is a blurry line
between what is a syllable and what is a word.

I would assume that most Westerners who learned a character
based language like Chinese didn't learn characters, so would
have to devise a system to transliterate.  I am not aware of any
old systems of Chinese transliteration, that seems to be a
modern thing.  I am very interested in your thoughts on this.  
Regards,
Brian