Re: VMs: Welsh/Cornish

[<elillie@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Arqy0plex wrote:

>He is trying to fit Welsh into Voynichese (or
>squeeze Welsh out of it) and is already reduced
>to having single Voynich letters encode digraphs
>and even trigraphs like "ry" and "ryd".

Then you discount any possibility of (any) Voynich symbols being composed
of  more than one letter? According to you, it absolutely must be "one
symbol  equals one letter" ?
>A weird sort of Welsh too. He gives <q> as the
>article "y". But he also gives <o> as "o".

Sometimes "o" really is just an "o"....

>The VMS then would have an extraordinarily high
>proportion of nouns starting with "o"--about 99%.

"o-", used as a prefix, can mean "of, from, with". Not counting words that
 actually begin with "o"..... (and there are many.)


Hello to the list.

I would like to comment on a couple of the points raised by Arqy0plex and
Jacques Guy in the posting shown above.
a)Digraphs:

While the size of the Voynich character set is too small to allow for the
presence of any real amount of di- or trigraphs, an enterprising (or
sadistic) Voynich author could have thrown in just a couple of them to
befuddle any would be code breakers.  Several past postings to the list
have included links to Latin manuscripts in the Bodleian Library or
musings about Beneventan script. Just a few of the abbreviations used in
either of these types is sufficient to baffle a reader versed in the
text's base language, let alone a text that's had its alphabet shifted.

B)High proportion of nouns starting with "o":

One of the breakthroughs of cryptographic analysis of medieval times was
the discovery of a method to calculate character frequency in a text. I
have yet to see someone realize that the technique could have been
defeated by the Voynich author simply by going out of his way to use words
that begin with the same letter. For example, instead of writing "Roberts
son wrecked the darker yacht" he would write "Bob's boy busted the black
boat". Simple, yes---but it serves to illustrate the point.
Until later.

Erni



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