(07-09-2017, 01:41 PM)Koen Gh. wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well done, Marco.
Now my naive impression was that such position-based variety was merely typographical. For example, t and T look different but represent the same sound based on its posotion in the sentence.
Emma generally proposes changes in sound based on writing uncertainties.
Now in effect these two possibilities are the same, but it's still an important distinction to keep in mind.
Hi Koen,
I must say that I don't understand how the two possibilities can be the same. While capitalization is the first thing I thought of when I first came to know of the phenomenon, there are marked differences:
- the Voynich ms is small: if we assume that several characters are typographical variants of other characters, we are only left with less than 10 truly different sounds
- characters that appear to be added in line initial words are also common elsewhere, not only at the beginning of words (while capital letters are constrained to appear at the beginning of words)
- but the greatest difference is that in Voynichese characters seem to be added to words at the beginning of a line: the phenomenon is not a substitution like capitalization.
This last point is supported by the line-start prefix-first quasi-repetitions discussed above, but of course this is not the first time it is proposed as the best explanation of the observable data. See for instance You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..