Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 11	[1992 January 28]
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The Voynich Vowels

A while ago, I started looking at the Voynich vowel system,
again on the assumptions that this stuff is real language
encoded in a real alphabet.  This got pushed aside over the
holiday, but Mr Guy's recent messages induced me to look over
the old notes.  I hope my stumblings and musings will be of
help to you.

I decided to attack the problem on two fronts simultaneously

(a) analyse the roots and inflections to isolate what seemed
    to be vowels

(b) on the assumption the script was constructed, analyse the
    ligatured forms looking for vowels and diphthongs

Later, I saw the table of ligatures in the D'Imperio document,
and was much encouraged.  I'd noticed that Currier's S looked
like cc run together, and found ca, but hadn't noticed oo, co,
or c9 ligatured.

Well, my analysis, principally from the "root and stem" forms
I give in a previous note, suggested that (Guy transcription)
c, a and o were vowels.  It also suggested that 9 was a vowel
except when final, where it seems to serve some other function.
Of course, if I'm wrong about the words and Mr Guy is right,
then my evidence shows 9 to be a vowel always.

Next, I asked myself, Why would the devisor of this script care
about cc, ca and so on?  And why are these vowels sometimes
ligatured and sometimes not?

At that moment, a note of familiarity crept in, and the thought
occurred, "suppose cc is the same vowel as c, but lengthened?"
From which it was but a short step to this hypothesis:

	a	alpha
	c	epsilon
	cc	eta
	o	omicron
	oo	omega

And, you know, that would explain patterns like ooo: that
occurs in the word Zo:on, not an uncommon word!

[Note: the Greek in this, and most other, notes is romanised
in the modern manner, with eta and omega written as "e:" and
"o:", and with kappa and chi as "k" and "kh".  I transcribed
upsilon as "y" or "u" according to personal taste.]

At that point, I intended to count all the occurrences of
mono, di, tri &c phthongs in the text, and see whether they
did match the pattern of Greek.  Somehow, there was never
enough time.  And I never found a candidate iota or upsilon.

But if the usual (not invariable) practice was to ligature
the long vowels, and the true diphthongs, but not to ligature
adjacent vowels that belonged to different syllable, then
perhaps the Voynich style would result.  Thus, in theou, the
epsilon would be isolated and the ou ligatured.

After the holiday, a brief search for obvious words with one
or fewer consonants - he:, ho, tou, to: (or to:i) - and of
course the zo:e: and theou mentioned above - seemed to be
going nowhere.  And I couldn't believe nobody had tried Greek
before.  So it sort of drifted off into the limbo of ideas.

But Mr Guy claims, by entirely different reasoning, that the
Voynich c and o are "e" and "o"!  Maybe there's something here
worth following up on.

A last point:  it is possible that this script was invented to
encode a Greek dialect, but that the underlying language is not
Greek.  Many languages have short and long vowels; maybe somebody
thought this script would work for Italian or Occitan.

Robert