Rules for Consonant/Vowel Alternation

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RULES FOR CONSONANT/VOWEL ALTERNATION

Exposing an Underlying Binary Pattern

This is a set of simple rules by which we can render the Voynich text into a series of alternating vowels and consonants.

Note well, that what I am calling ‘vowels’ and ‘consonants’ may not be linguistic at all: 

Yet in the Voynich script glyphs that stand for vowels or consonants in Latin (or elsewhere) have been ascribed to these places in the underlying sequence. 

At root, by my account of it, the fundamental cycle is astronomical: the sequence concerns the starting and stopping of the sun at the solstices in its yearly course. 

At root the pattern is: stop/start/stop/start.

The stops have been given consonant glyphs and the starts have been given vowel glyphs. 

I call them vowels and consonants for this reason, and only for this reason. The underlying binary pattern is non-linguistic. 

My argument is that [o] is the primal vowel, and that the underlying text is a sequence of [o] glyphs alternating with consonants. Thus:

o|o|o|o|o|o|

VCVCVCVCVC

The gallows glyphs are, by my account, the primal consonants, (representing the solstices and equinoxes), the others being derivative.

The vowels are [o] and modifications of [o], namely [e] and [a]. 

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RULES

1. [y] can act as vowel or consonant, (but not both at once), as required, in any circumstances 

2. [ee] is a single (long) vowel – breaking [o] in half - , and so are variants: [eee], [ea], [ea] and where an [o] replaces an [e] as in [oa]. 

That is, double (and triple and other multiple) vowels – all vowel clusters - are counted as variants of [ee] which is counted as a single vowel (and itself a variant of [o].) 

3. [iin] counts as a single consonant configuration, as do the variants [in] and [iiin] as well as the same forms with [r], [iir], [ir], [iiir].

4. [ch] and [sh] are single consonants, as are the benched gallows. Even if we accept them as double consonants in some way, they count as single units.

5. The double consonant form [ld] counts as a single unit, a consonant. 

6. Like [y], the glyph [ch] (and [sh]) can act as vowel or consonant, as required, in any circumstances. The glyph [ch] is a variant of [ee]. 

With these rules – supplying a consonant or vowel value to the word spaces as we proceed – we can bring almost the entireity of the Voynich text into CV conformity.

Even if we object that these rules are too flexible, they still serve to illustrate a deep bedrock of alternating CV glyphs matched to a basic binary pattern. 

R.B.