Re: VMs: Welsh/Cornish

[steve ekwall <ekwall2@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi all :-)

EACH "character/glyph" CAN be a/is a LETTER (duh!)... however, one 
must 'mirror' its DECODING KEY when you encounter the next 'gallows 
character'... THAT "next gallows character" is indeed 'pointing' at a 
(new/different) letter on a 'SIMPLE KEY TEXT'.

What you SEE is what you get... sorry I don't know the langauge or 
maybe I could help more here.

best to you & yours there..
-=se=-
steve (the Time IS Now though :-)) ekwall

 Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 20:16:27 +1000
 From: Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
 Reply-To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
 To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
 Subject: Re: VMs: Welsh/Cornish
 
 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)
 
 Then see what I wrote about <in> and <iin>
 
 >   >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".... 
 
 And I do believe that <o> is "o" in which case,
 if the VMS is Welsh, <q> cannot be "y"
 
 >   >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.) 
 >   >Next, "y" never occurs before a word starting with a vowel. 
 
 >   "Never"? Then some of the glossaries I referenced must be replete with
 >
 >   typos: "ya"; "yach"; "yech"; "yedhow"; "yoch"; "yor".
 
 Yes. They do not exist in Welsh. If they did, that would
 be ia, iach, iech, ieddow, ioch, ior. Anyway, those are single
 words, like iaith ("language" in Welsh). What the author is
 claiming is that <q> = "y" and <o> = "o". If so the language
 cannot be Welsh.
 
 
 >   In Welsh (and Cornish) pronunciation (especially at the beginnings of
 >   words), "m" often mutates into the sound of "b" or "p". 
 
 Nasalization and spirantization go the other way around, 
 e.g. ci "dog" -> vy nghi "my dog" (nasalization)
 Or Breton ti "house" -> va zi "my house" (spirantization).
 
 Nasals often become spirants, e.g. Gaelic mad -> mhad (pronounced
 vad), Breton ar vor from *ar mor (lit.: the sea)
 
 Those are features common to all modern Celtic languages.
 
 They could be (relatively) recent (i.e. 2000 years old), as I see 
 no clear evidence of mutations (that's what those changes of the 
 initial consonants are called) in Pierre-Yves Lambert's "La langue 
 gauloise".
 
 Even when they certainly existed, mutations were not always noted
 in writing (viz. Old Breton texts quoted in Arzel Even's
 "Istor ar Yezhoù Keltiek"--History of the Celtic Languages)
 
 
 
 
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