Re: VMs: [ha] [hb] not different languages

[Barbara Barrett <barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Barbara babbles;

Thank you Glen for an illuminating post.

One thing that dosn't seem to have been considered is that if the
writing system of the voynich is based upon phonetic principles then any
two persons could produce radically different statistics even in the
same language. A good example is back issues of "Le Maitre Phonetique",
the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, pre 1971 when all
the contributions were written in the international phonetic alphabet so
the contributors wrote exactly as they sounded out words. Even 'though
there is a certain phonetic "flatness" to the educated middle (and
upwards) class contributors there were still large differences between
individuals, particularly in vowels.

If the Voynich authors had large geographical, social class, and
educational, differences between them then thier renderings of the same
language would be very different indeed. One does not need to understand
the transcription system below to visually recognise the differences in
phonetic rendering of the words given as examples. 

ACCENT:             WORDS:  Butter       Dune     Dance     Thursday  
       General American:   /bv;te;r;/   /dun/    /dans/    /Te;r;zdeI/
Recieved Pronounication:   /bv;t@^r/    /djun/   /d@ns/    /T@^r;zdeI:/
          Middle London:   /bv;?a/      /jun/    /dc;ns/   /fv;r;zde:/

When one adds to the above the differences in grammar that also occur
between the above groups (which are not great enough to be considered
dialect) then a phonetic starting point could well produce statistics
that would falsly indicate different languages. Even a siple participle
such as "of" may be phonetically rendered as;
/v;v/ /@;v/ /c;v/ /eU/ /o:/ /ov/ /av/ or /af/!

This phonetic approach could also partly explain some of the repitions
of the "same" word, for while langauge seldom permits the same semantic
unit to be repeated it does alow phonetically identical words to be
repeated.
For example, the instuction "Marry merry Mary" in some accents (lowland
scots in this example) would be;
/mari: mari: mari:/. Context would provide the nessesary clarification.

Barbara
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