Folder: mail-procmail-2008-11-18/2007-02-20-160800-voynich
From owner-vms-list@voynich.net  Tue Jan 25 08:24:45 2005
Message-Id: <200501251016.j0PAGP3m028313@pop2.alphalink.com.au>
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 20:16:27 +1000
To: vms-list@voynich.net
From: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
Subject: Re: VMs: Welsh/Cornish

25/01/2005 12:54:56 AM, Arqy0plex@aol.com 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)