Re: VMs: Has anyone been down this route before?

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

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, Jacques Guy wrote:
> >So...suppose ['l] -> /ch/.
>
> /h/ is always preceded by /c/  with or without intruding
> gallows. /c/ is always followed by /h/, again with or
> without intruding gallows. So we can have only:

Also, as far as I can tell, c is more or less indistinghishable from e,
except for this "followed by h" thing.  And, you'd have to trash word
boundaries, because ch is not restricted to initial position.

> Another hypothesis was that /qo/ = the Greek
> article "ho".

However, ho is simply the nominative singular masculine form, and one
would expect to find ho ~ he ~ ton (and all the other gender/case forms).
Still, q-o- does look rather like an article in the context of European
languages.  It's the main prefix (actually proclitic), barring things like
Germanic ge- or be- and the various prepositionally-derived things in
Germanic, Latin/Romance, Greek, and Slavic.

In the article line a better bet might be le ~ la ~ les in French, where
at least the initial consonant is always the same.  The Spanish/Italian
pattern with el/la or il/la, never mind the plurals, is more difficult to
see here.

Or one might argue that the Voynich writer(s) had realized that the
article was a single logical category and/or a cryptological weakness and
had reduced it to a single form q-, not used for anything else, precisely
to abort this line of attack.  Of course, we still know nouns from verbs
in that case.

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