Re: VMs: Phonetic VMS?

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

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, mjmurphy wrote:
> Has any one attempted to assign a phonetics to the written VMS symbols?

This is a somewhat puzzling question.  Do you mean just a way to read it
off, e.g., to refer to the tokens in oral discussion?  I certainly
occasionally pronounce the EVA transcriptions more or less as they look,
with some fuzziness about the vowels.  One could also read the Voynich
Manuscript text directly using the same principles.  Read the thing
transcribed q as "k" and so on.  This might be useful in the absence of a
decryption for the VMs, but not if there were one.  In that case one would
naturally read based on the decrytion.

For example we could assign arbitrary but consistent sound values to the
Latin letters of an English text and then read them off in lieu of reading
the actual English text - prononcing the word "useful" as oo-say-fool For
purposes of this example I assume that, though we are ignorant of the
Latin alphabet we have coincidentally assigned more or less standard
values to its characters.  However, if we could read English, it would be
more useful to use the conventional pronunciation for English, wouldn't
it?  One would only come up with oo-say-fool if one was trying to describe
the spelling to a speaker of another language without reverting to listing
the names of the letters.

Apart from arbitrary prononunciations of the EVA (or other)
transcriptions, and assuming that the VMs does encrypt a message, which is
certainly the most interesting basis on which to proceed, I would assume
that what the text properly sounds like is someone reading the equivalent
deciphered text.  On those terms, until the text is deciphered it has no
more sound than, say, the Phaistos Disk.

I guess Jacques' work with the Easter Island Rongo-Rongo materials
provides a good parallel.  There is a way to read these by pronouncing
aloud names for the little figures in Rapanuian, but without decypherment
there is no way to read the message, though one assumes it would also be
something in Rapanuian, but more coherent.

> .. are there any theories as to what it might sound like if read aloud?

My best guess would be that if deciphered it would sound like some
European written language from the 1400s to early 1600s, probably Latin as
pronounced in some corner of Europe in that period.

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