Letters (Re: VMs: Welsh/Cornish)

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

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Jacques Guy wrote:

> 25/01/2005 12:54:56 AM, Arqy0plex@xxxxxxx wrote:
> >   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" ?

> That is not the point. The point is this: if you allow some Voynich
> letters to represent digraphs and trigraphs then there will be too few
> left to be single letters so that the alphabet won't even be able to
> account for Rotokas (six consonants, five vowels) or Piraha (three
> vowels, seven consonants in the men's speech, six consonants only in the
> women's).

I suppose both of you, when you say "Voynich letter," mean "EVA letter,"
or something like that?  Or perhaps I could put it "Voynich letter" is to
be understood as "Voynich graph represented as one roman character in EVA
transcriptions"?  Let's just say graphs - meaning things one tends to
perceive as individual characters given a background in writing with
Roman, Greek, or Cyrillic scripts.  A different script background might
modify this inclination.

I really have no problem with "Voynich letter" if we all understand
certainly what it means and what the implications of that meaning are.
At present it strikes me as misleading.  At some future point it ought to
mean "a basic transcriptional unit in the writing system used in the
Voynich manuscript."  At the moment it means "whatever somebody thinks is
such a unit" and two people might think different things and, potentially,
both be wrong.  So I go on here with "graph."

Given the regularity with which both the e (or c) and i graphs occur in
repeated sequences of themselves - homographic sequences? - it seems
highly unlikely that all the individual graphs are actually letters per
se.  Probably sequences of graphs are representational units or de facto
letters.  The usual EVA transcription tables take this into account for i,
though not e (or c), and I suspect most people ignore this ambivalent
admission of mapping issues most of the time anyway.

Apart from this, given the similarities in the range of curlicues attached
to e-like graphs on the one hand and the range of the same attached to
i-like graphs on the other, it seems similarly likely that many of the
unitary graphs of the VMs are actually multiple letters - letter sequences
- the curlicues or flourishes being separate logical entities attached to
preceding e's or i's in writing to form digraphs, and sometimes trigraphs
or worse when more than one flourish is attached.

I frankly have no idea what the proper decomposition of graphs into
"Voynich letters" is, but a few experiments with various approaches
suggests to me that there is no (worse) shortage of letters if one takes
this approach.  Of course, word-lengths, distribitions and frequencies,
and even the association of probable consonant and vowel status with such
graphs as remain individual letters changes noticeably.

The only conclusion I have drawn so far is that we are probably taking the
wrong fork at the very outset if we take the obvious ink-delimited-by-
space approach to identifying a "Voynich letters."

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