Before proceeding any further into the inner workings of the Voynich language, I want to ruminate for a moment on the question: ‘Yes, but can it be spoken?’
Was the language supposed to be vocalized, or is it merely a silent text on a page, a literary abstraction?
I explain how the text is generated from the fusion of paradigmatic glyph sequences (words), but do the glyphs have phonic values?
Is the glyph [o] meant to be pronounced like the Latin [o]?
Or is it not meant to be pronounced at all?
By my analysis, the language is more a system of symbols, the cycles of the YEAR (or the divisions of astrology) rendered into text using an assortment of glyphs mainly chosen for their visual properties.
The glyphs have been shorn from their linguistic context and radically repurposed.
We can catalogue what the glyph form [ch] might mean in Latin or other manuscripts, but what does it mean here?
And does it have a phonic value?
And is that phonic value changed when it becomes [sh]?
The system I describe is almost mathematical – or astro-mathematical, at least. Or, we might describe it as: systematically calenderical.
A highly artificial construction, from the roots up, in any case.
And yet, there is the appearance that pronounceability was a factor in its design from the beginning.
This is because the most primal pattern, that of the primitive paradigm (as I call it), is equivalent to a sequence of alternating vowels and consonants.
To recap: the bedrock text is an undifferentiated sequence of [o] glyphs (omicrons).
…oooooooooooo…
This is the circle of the YEAR, undifferentiated.
The first differentiation marks the solstices and punctuates the text as:
…o|o|o|o|o|o|…
It describes the sun’s motion: stop\start\stop\start\stop.
But it also establishes, from the outset, the pattern:
...VCVCVCVCVCV…
This pattern is then elaborated when the equinoxes are distinguished from the solstices.
Now the solstices are marked as double-letters.
…o||o|o||o|o||o…
And so the phonic pattern becomes:
…VCCVCVCCVCVCCV…
Still, it is a variation on consonant/vowel alternation, and this is preserved throughout the following glyph transformations.
The [o] glyph changes into [e] or [a] or [i]. Recognizeable as vowels in Latin languages.
The glyph [o] does not change into a glyph that is a consonant.
There is a persistent, recognizeable pattern of CVCV alternation throughout the text, because the glyph [o] and its mutations behave like vowels.
Assuredly, there are complexities at the higher levels – the gallows glyphs are double consonants, for a start, and what are the benched gallows? – but there is the unmistakeable impression of CV alternation.
Our paradigms: QOKEEDY and CHOLDAIIN both display CV alternation, but with doubled (or long) vowels.
Evidently, the [ee] in QOKEEDY – a long vowel – becomes a consonant as the [ch] in CHOLDAIIN.
All the same, there appears to have been a concerted effort, by design, from the beginning, to make the text have a pattern of CV alternation.
It is accomplished, in the first instance, by making the bedrock text pure [o] glyphs – the primal vowel – and then punctuating it with consonants marking the solstices and equinoxes in the cycle of the YEAR.
The year is CVCVCV and this pattern persists throughout all levels of Voynichese.
The distinction between vowel and consonant is, of course, a phonic one: they are pronounced differently.
And flowing speech is, largely, a flow of alternating vowel sounds and consonantal sounds.
The implication is that the language is made to be spoken. It is equipped – from the outset – with a CV alternation pattern that invites it and facilitates it.
Or, at least we can say, it looks like it is made to be spoken, and this is an effect by design.
* * *
It has always seemed remarkable to me that the EVA transcription, by rendering glyphs to their nearest and most obvious Latin letter, produces a text that seems so plainly coherent, readable and speakable.
Whatever limitations there are to the EVA transcription, it is an experiment that demonstrates just how text-like the text is.
And how it seems like it is made to be spoken.
Again: this effect is by design and follows from starting with a bedrock of [o] glyphs (the primal vowel.)
Indeed, we can add whatever consonantal sounds we like to the Voynich glyphs, and as long as we don’t touch the [o] glyphs (and kindred vowels) we have an entirely pronounceable text.
In EVA we have little trouble pronouncing:
sor.olky.qoty.ty.tor.cheyky.totol.opchedy.qokain.sheky.qokain.ol-
This is because there is a pattern of CV alternation. (Take the [y] as an [o].) It is the bedrock pattern. The text is built upon it.
Glyphs mutate consonant for consonant and vowel for vowel. The pattern is preserved and persists into the high level text.
In theory, if we could discover the true values of the Voynich consonant glyphs we could pronounce it as intended, or a near approximation.
Moreover, the primordial stream of [o] glyphs has been broken up into units that have every appearance of being words separated by word breaks.
Indeed, the creation of the paradigms QOKEEDY and CHOLDAIIN introduce a system of word breaks. The text is very deliberately broken up into words.
Words are units of text, and speech.
But if we could pronounce it, it is inconceivable that it would then be reconstituted as a natural language.
If we could speak it, on these terms, it would not, I dare say, be any known natural language, or any natural language at all.
It would still be a constructed language, an artificial language, but one that could be spoken, pronounced, vocalized.
The glyphs have sounds.
But, conceivably, with the selection of the appropriate consonants, you might have some semblance of a natural language.
You can make a mock-up of almost any European language by adding their characteristic consonants to a series of the most common vowels.
But it is just a semblance, at best a loose pijin, not a functional spoken language.
By my analysis, Voynichese is the year made text. What does the year sound like in human speech, or song?
Perhaps the effect is supposed to be aesthetic, in the first instance?
Nevertheless, it does seem to me that, by design, from the outset, the language was created to be viable as human speech.
It is not Klingon.
Nor is it barbarous like some of the barbarous names and formulae found in magical grimoires and the like.
One imagines it is felicitous to the ear.
It is not unpronounceable gibberish – but it could be argued it is very pronounceable gibberish.
It is hard to imagine the sounds have lexical significations in the normal sense. The glyphs encode the cycles and sub-cycles of the year. I propose they are meaningful as that. How is this captured as speech?
In a hoax scenario, the author has tried to create verisimilitude – a semblance of naturalness in order to deceive and fool – but in that case the lengths to which this have been taken are quite unnecessary.
My entire analysis speaks against a hoax scenario: it reveals a text of elaborate and purposeful design. The language is cosmological in conception and application.
Does this extend to it being a spoken artificial tongue?
* * *
There is a very esoteric order of symbolism that might be relevant here in that it places speech within a traditional cosmological framework.
In Titus Burckhardt’s short treatise The Mystical Astrology of Ibn Arabi, he reproduces an astrological system in which the letters of the Arabic alphabet are apportioined to the 28 Mansions of the Moon.
This in itself is not unusual: it is a common move in Islamic cosmology.
But the Arabic letters are arranged according to sound, with the labial and dental sounds first and gutteral sounds last.
That is, Ibn Arabi arranges the sequence of the heavens from sounds made at the front of the mouth to sounds made at the back of the mouth.
The underlying parallelisms are very ancient and very arcane.
The mouth – the oral cavity – is being compared to the ‘roof of the heavens’.
We find it in the deepest etymologies of the Greek word ouranos = the heavens, the sky. The oldest meanings are: the roof of the mouth.
How, we might ask, is the roof of the mouth like the sky and the heavens?
The analogy does not come readily to the modern mind.
But it is the operative analogy in Ibn Arabi’s scheme: the sounds of the Arabic tongue correspond to the Mansions of the Moon because the roof of the mouth is analogous to the bowl of the sky.
In the human microcosm, the cavity of the mouth is a reiteration of the cavity of the sky, the sub-lunary world under the roof of the heavens.
For this reason, placing the tongue on the roof of the mouth has a cosmological meaning in yoga and similar systems.
This is to think of human speech cosmologically.
Such an order of ideas, I conjecture, might be implicit in the design of Voynichese where, after all - in a manner very similar to Ibn Arabi’s schema - the Voynich glyphs are appoprtioned to astrological divisions.
This is not just being aped for effect in the Voynich manuscript: instead, there is abundant evidence of a carefully designed, coherent system.
And evidently sounds, speech, is part of the system.
* * *
Any account of the Voynich language as a mechanically generated artifact must also explain all aspects of its naturalness.
Why does it look so readable, so tantalizingly pronounceable?
It is not just an epiphenomenon of the mechanics: it is so by design.
All I can suppose is that the Voynich project was a thought experiment: the author wanted to show that it could be done, and has pursued the logic of the symbolism comprehensively to the end.
R.B.
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