Re: VMs: Voynichese as an Abugida

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 26 Jul 2004, Koontz John E wrote:
> There are, of course, some holes in the pattern, e.g., only iiiin (once?)
> has 4 i's and only id and ix occur in the i + d or x series, if I
> understand the presentation.  The holes should, of course, reflect rare or
> impossible CV combinations.

Answering myself - a bad habit:

In regard to id and ix, but not iid, etc., iix, etc., I don't know if the
frequencies work, but it occurs to me that the only vowel that normally
follows q in Western Euopean scripts is u, i.e., in a q series you'd only
find qu, not qa qe qi qo qu.

And as far as the oddities of q(o)- Oqo-, often suggested as an article,
or as 'and', if it were a Romance language, the singular articles, which
are proclitic to the following word and often written contracted with it
in standard orthographies, are generally lV or Vl.  Plurals are generally
lV or lVs.  In German, the articles are generally dV or dVC.  In English
it is, of course, an invariant "dhe" orthographically, and dh (perhaps not
distinguished from th).  In Arabic the article is invariant al, but it
assimilates to a consonant initial.  In Hebrew it's invariant ha- I think.
In both it's proclitic as in the European languages.  In the Romance
languages, especially, the form of the article associated with a word
concords with the form of the word final.  Most modern (and medieval)
European langauges with articles have more or less extensive sets of
contractions of prepositions and articles.  I believe articles and their
contractions were often abbreviated in manuscripts.

As far as encoding Romance languages, it seems possible that someone
trying to write secretly in a language in which the initial of each noun
encoding screamed "I am an l" would try to conceal this in some way,
perhaps by using a different scheme for other l's.  However, they might
not think to disguise the vowels or the -s- of the plural or the
concordance with the word final.

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