Re: VMs: Welsh/Cornish

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

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Nick Pelling wrote:
> Structurally (which I use to mean both linguistically,
> cryptographically, and palaeographically), the #1 problem with
> Voynichese is the letter "o".  Linguistically, it looks like a vowel -
> it's used like a vowel - heck, it even smells like a vowel (a little
> in-joke for all the synaesthetes on the list). And it has all the
> cryptographic fingerprints of a high frequency token (i.e. one
> containing little information). And palaeographically, it looks like
> (what John E Koontz would call) a letter, even though it also sits there
> proudly in our EVA transcriptions.

I think I tried to call it a graph, but I don't insist on the term!

The graph that looks like o (and is transcribed as o in EVA) is definitely
an interesting problem.  And a is a somewhat comparable one.  Stealing
ideas from various places I have tried looking at o as an (EVA) e with,
for example, an n-flourish, and as a mark to initiate sequences or perhaps
to separate ambiguous sequences.  Similarly for a, it could be e + i or a
sequence separater.  So far I'm not particularly enlightened, just
tantalized.  There's a lot of that going around.

> And yet... when you try to apply any of these methodologies to the text as
> we see it, Voynichese "o" doesn't really play out comfortably in any of the
> typical roles. I'd suggest you look at how it appears in words - what do
> you really think is going on when you look at words like "otolal" etc?

Well, for example, and not trying to sort out the flourishes, something
like e+flourish loop-gallows+flourish e+flourish i+flourish e+i i+flourish
or, e F lg F e F i F eii F, with spaces between possible "letters" and
using lg for a loop-gallows and F for the various flourishes.

> equally plausible... and all equally wrong, & for the same reason (that
> though letters like "o" and "a" look like vowels, they don't actually play
> out like real vowels).

Here I agree with you, but perhaps for different reasons, if you'll
forgive the expression!  In this context, e (first part of EVA a and o)
and i (first part of EVA l) and eii look more like consonants and the
flourishes (not separate transcriptional letters in EVA) look like vowels.
You do get a very reasonable number of consonants if you treat different
length sequences of e and i as different consonants (a sort of tally-based
enumerative scheme) and there are about as many flourishes as you'd want
vowels, maybe more, but even though dividing o and a and l and so on into
pieces increases the number and length of i and e sequences the consonant
distribution seems off.  I posted some numbers a while back.

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