The Voynich Ninja

(20-09-2017, 01:21 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Marco, have you ever tried to see the affixes of chol and chey? It would be interesting to see if they form larger words in the same fashion. Thought I'd ask you before running any tests myself.

Hi David,
here is what I have found. If you want to run an independent test, we can then compare our results. I think there could be some interesting data here (even if I am not sure it is related with function words).

wait - those are all the chol and chey group words? I assumed there would be more variation.
I'll run some tests later and will report back.

Anton - that's the general idea, but I don't see offhand any words that appear with enough frequency throughout the corpus to be "and".

(20-09-2017, 04:22 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.wait - those are all the chol and chey group words? I assumed there would be more variation.
I'll run some tests later and will report back.

Hi David, the lists have been trimmed. 
There are several more words that only occur once or twice. These are the most frequent variants.

PS: complete A/B lists attached.

(20-09-2017, 02:38 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What I would suggest offhand is to look for the word "and". It is a universal word (not like an article), it is frequent (sometimes, and the more so in the past, being used in exchange for words such as "then", "so" etc.). And it should be ubiquitous - namely, it should be found even in texts of highly conspective nature which may lack articles or prepositions.

How can it be located? I can think of searching it in between vords relating to homogenous objects - such e.g. as the "Voynich stars". One could just map all the f68r1 and f68r2 objects and see what are the vords joining them (if any).

I am not sure this is totally universal as a "word".
See for instance You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (XII Century).

(20-09-2017, 05:10 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(20-09-2017, 02:38 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What I would suggest offhand is to look for the word "and". It is a universal word (not like an article), it is frequent (sometimes, and the more so in the past, being used in exchange for words such as "then", "so" etc.). And it should be ubiquitous - namely, it should be found even in texts of highly conspective nature which may lack articles or prepositions.

How can it be located? I can think of searching it in between vords relating to homogenous objects - such e.g. as the "Voynich stars". One could just map all the f68r1 and f68r2 objects and see what are the vords joining them (if any).

I am not sure this is totally universal as a "word".
See for instance You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (XII Century).

Definitely not universal as a "word" as Marco points out.

In Latin, for example, "and" is very frequently indicated by the number 7 and attached to the word that follows, and also stands for the letters "et" as in etiam (written 7iam). Thus, the same symbol is used for two different functions and doesn't necessarily ever stand alone because the same convention is used in other languages that may use a word other than "et" for "and", but which still uses the Latin scribal 7 symbol to express it.


In some languages "and" is a single or double character added to the beginning of a word. In English we are used to putting "and" between words, but it's not always done that way, sometimes adding a character to the beginning of the first of the two words that go together represents "and" and once again, it is not a separate word, it is attached to other words in much the same way as a prefix is attached to words rather than standing alone.

(20-09-2017, 02:38 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What I would suggest offhand is to look for the word "and". It is a universal word (not like an article), it is frequent (sometimes, and the more so in the past, being used in exchange for words such as "then", "so" etc.). And it should be ubiquitous - namely, it should be found even in texts of highly conspective nature which may lack articles or prepositions.

How can it be located? I can think of searching it in between vords relating to homogenous objects - such e.g. as the "Voynich stars". One could just map all the f68r1 and f68r2 objects and see what are the vords joining them (if any).

Some languages use a clitic to express 'and'. Arabic, Hebrew, even Latin do this.

(20-09-2017, 02:38 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What I would suggest offhand is to look for the word "and". It is a universal word (not like an article), it is frequent (sometimes, and the more so in the past, being used in exchange for words such as "then", "so" etc.). And it should be ubiquitous - namely, it should be found even in texts of highly conspective nature which may lack articles or prepositions.

How can it be located? I can think of searching it in between vords relating to homogenous objects - such e.g. as the "Voynich stars". One could just map all the f68r1 and f68r2 objects and see what are the vords joining them (if any).

Some time ago I suggested that the most common word in the manuscript, namely ‘daiin’ might be interpreted as something like 'and'. See You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

When one sees a  frequent word in any inscrutable text, the most natural thing to look for is that it might be an article or joining word.

That daiin might be "the" or "and" was proposed far back in its history.

In the latter parts of the manuscript chedy is the most common Vword, as has been noted by many people, including Currier and probably others before him.


What is important is to see how it behaves and where it falls between other Vords.

daiin actually has many variations. -aiin is preceded by many different glyphs, and the variations include different numbers of strokes and a tail that appears to have different lengths. It may not be a frequent word at all, it may be several different words expressed in a similar way, or it may be a set of numbers (or something else).

It bears a strong resemblance to Roman numerals, but if it is numerals, then the selection is rather constrained (unless the combination of strokes and tail-length is used to increase the possible interpretations). The resemblance to Roman numerals might be completely coincidental but Roman numerals were still used in body text by a few scribes in the early 15th century. By the later 15th century, they had mostly died out.

daiin is illī, d stands for l sound and aiin for long o (n marks long vowels)
So common ending -dy stands for -ellus, and -ody for -ulus, diminuitive forms often used in medieval latin. Interestingly, -ody is very rarely used in bathing section, so this gives us at least three(!) authors

(20-09-2017, 06:58 PM)farmerjohn Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.daiin is illī, d stands for l sound and aiin for long o (n marks long vowels)
So common ending -dy stands for -ellus, and -ody for -ulus, diminuitive forms often used in medieval latin. Interestingly, -ody is very rarely used in bathing section, so this gives us at least three(!) authors

I think it's very unlikely that such a large proportion of words in a manuscript with several differently themed sections would all end in -ellus.

In fact, since you referenced medieval Latin abbreviations, if it were such, then -dy has many possible interpretations, including -bz (-bus) or -rum or even a category designation as it was done in Hildegard von Bingen's code, but... what is important to remember is that even if the VMS includes Latin-based glyphs or even Latin scribal conventions, it doesn't necessarily mean it's Latin (the conventions could be used to mean something else and were also used to mean other things in other languages even when the same symbols were used).