![]() ![]() So the sounds before and after vowels must be less sonorous, and in turn the sounds before or after those must be less sonorous again. ![]() These are always the peak sonority in every syllable, and the SSP broadly states that sonority must decrease away from a vowel. The sounds with the highest sonority are vowels. The details don’t concern us, only that some sounds are more sonorous than others, and that the sequence of sonority orders the sequence of sounds in a syllable. The sequence in question is governed by sonority, a phonological term we can think of loosely as relative loudness. In short, SSP is a rule which makes sounds within a syllable abide by a set sequence. With that out of the way, you may be wondering exactly what the sonority sequencing principle is (we’ll call it SSP from now on, for the sake of space). So long as the Voynich text is a natural language* the sonority sequencing principle should be able to tell us something. It is a universal principle which applies to all languages and lets us see part of the linguistic structure even if we do not know the language behind the characters. But when I set out my thoughts behind an agnostic approach to reading the manuscript the sonority sequencing principle was the kind of tool I had in mind. It certainly isn’t engaging directly with the text of the Voynich manuscript, which should be our first goal. A post about the sonority sequencing principle may seem wilfully obscure. To those without any knowledge of linguistics, let me apologize. ![]()
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