Re: VMs: ... speculating with "dairol"

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

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Knox Mix wrote:
> Can we be certain there is no connection of EVA vowels to *real* vowels?
> (a = a,e,i,o, or u -- or y-as-vowel)? Some ciphers and other series of
> characters will show reasonable vowel/consonant divisions, some will
> show false vowel/consonant divisions, some (I would guess: most) will
> not be consistent from one section of text to another.

I believe that the Voynich ms glyphs rendered as vowels in the EVA
transcription consistently behave as vowels in statistical analyses of
vowel-like behavior.  I do not know to what extent similarity of shape and
patterned behavior determined the equation of Latin characters to Voynich
glyphs, but it seems to me that both were to some extent deliberately
employed.  Apart from this, the various tables of transcription systems
available on the Web show that there has been some degree of mutually
influencing evolution in the development of such systems.

In spite of this it seems very important to remember that EVA is not
Voynichese.  The encoding is very convenient, but it may be misleading in
various ways.  For one thing, it implies an analysis of the Voynich
writing into character entities that is very likely to be incorrect.  For
another, it does suggest vowel and consonant readings.  In fact, the EVA
transcription is perhaps a bit too seductively "pronounceable" to be quite
safe!

Anyway, even if you accept the resolution into characters, even if you
accept the consonant vs. vowel distinction implied and the clever way in
which the peculiar bench and gallows patterns are encoded with (c,s) + C +
h sequences, it seems unlikely that all the matchings of particular
consonants and vowels are correct.

> My questions are: Can the fact that EVA is somewhat pronounceable tell
> us anything helpful at all about Voynichese? Can the failure to resolve
> the glyphs into truly pronounceable words tell us anything helpful about
> Voynichese? Can the attempt be of any benefit?

To me it suggests that the encoding - no matter what the details are -
preserves the syllabicity (CV alternations) of the underlying language and
represents consonants and vowels in different ways.  That is, an
underlying form like cat (or whatever) is not encoded so a constituent
element in the encoding can sometimes represent c, sometimes a, sometimes
t.  It seems likely that the representation of a given sound is always the
same, or at least that consonants are usually represented in one way and
vowels in another.

In regard to this ladt point, think of Tolkien's various writing systems.
He imagined different cultures assigning columns from his systematic
tables of characters to various different series, perhaps columns 1
through 4 being assigned to labials, dentals, palatals and velars, or
alternatively to labials, dentals, velars and labiovelars, but always
using the glyphs from the columns as consonants and always representing
vowels with various auxiliary symbols or diacritics outside the system of
consonantal symbols.  If you see a stem with some attached loops in a
Tolkien composition you know it's a consonant, but you don't always know
which one.

As a linguist Tolkient thought of languages as having a set of sounds, and
he organized these mentally into a systematic grid of consonants and a
smaller grid or list of vowels.  It amused him to create an esthetic
script that combined a large grid suitable in size for writing consonants
with a set of smaller diacritic modifications and/or auxiliary characters
to represent vowels.  He used it to write several different invented
languages by plopping the different consonantal grids onto his larger grid
and the vowel list onto the list of auxiliaries.

I'm not sure exactly where Tolkien got the basic ideas for his script, but
he was fascinated with languages and familiar with the classical
Indo-European ones, and his scheme bears a certain generic resemblance to
the approach used in Devanagari.  It also resembles to some extent the
medieval and later approach to abbreviating words or parts of words to
consonantal frameworks with attached diacritics for omitted vowels or
inflectional endings.

I'm not suggesting that the Voynich author(s) thought of writing systems
and sounds in any of these ways, but whatever was done may have similar
properties.

Out of curiosity, I don't suppose Voynich and Tolkien were acquainted?
They were approximately contemporary, of course.

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