Vowels and consonants (Re: Dovetail battlements in Rome?)

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jorge Stolfi wrote:
 
> I recall that Jacques posted an explanation to the mailing list,
> a couple of years ago.

More than that. It was not very long after this group was
created at the instigation of John Baez.

in answer to Mark Perakh:
 
>     > Did anybody apply that method to VMS, and if yes, were the
>     > symbols in VMS reliably shown to be either vowels or consonants?
 
> Jacques did, and I gather that the results were inconclusive.

Right at the beginning, after I invented the first version of
"Frogguy", I put a slab of transliteration through Sukhotin's
algorithm and found that (EVA) <e> and <o> were vowels, whereas
<ch> was a consontant. Now <ch> is the spit-and-image of
the letter in the Beneventan script, and I thought it was
interesting. I wrote an article about it which was published
in Cryptologia I forget when, and, of course, I can't find
my offprints when I need them, which is right now. Earlier, 
I think, I had applied Sukhotin's algorithm to some Voynich
text. The transcription resorted to 17 letters. 14 were marked
as consonants, 3 as vowels -- almost a perfect match for Nahuatl.
That led me to the "Aztec hypothesis", but I never seriously
believed in it.  We problem is that we do not know what constitutes
a letter. Is <ee> a single letter? or is  it <e>  duplicated?
(I am persuaded that  it is a single letter). <ch> is certainly
a single letter, but what about <cth> (Frogguy cqpt)? <in> is
certainly a single letter, but what about <iin> and the rarer
<iiin>? What of <il>, <iil>, <iiil>? It is just as when you
write English  in "minim," a medieval script so called because
"minim" written in it looks like "IIIIIIIIII". Or when you
write German "nennen" in gothic cursive, it looks like:

/ / // / / / / // / /

What do you do with that? Nasty.