Re: Exciting New Discovery!

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene Zandbergen)]

Bruce Grant wrote:

> Even if the _ch_ character represents "and", it might not represent the letters
> "e t" if the underlying language isn't Latin. 

Well, the letter _ch_ is so frequent that it cannot represent a word.
In fact, since it also seems to figure as part of _sh_ and all the 
intruding gallows, I would not be surprised if _ch_ represented even
less than one letter or phoneme.
Since _ch_ is always followed by one of a small set of other characters
(and not word space) I would also not be surprised if the combination of
_ch_ and the following letter form one letter/phoneme.
But I realise that other explanations are possible.

> Another possibility is that the word breaks are not really word breaks, but gaps
> where one letter cannot connect to the following one, as in Arabic. (Not an
> original idea, I know.) Perhaps the _ch_ in the "middle" of a "word" is actually
> the start of a new word/clause.

This is at variance with the following observations:
- labels (by definition delimited by spaces) also figure as words 
  in the text
- the letter _ch_ also occurs in labels.
 
This is not meant to be negative criticism. This is one of the rare
cases where I feel pretty confident about an(y) aspect of the Voynichese
script or language.

Cheers, Rene