The Voynich Ninja

I decided to go after otol otol. In essence, I wanted to see what affixes otol could have; and whether those affixes serve with other possible functors (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

I used my regex parser to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. This tool is in beta, feel free to use it but don't rely on me not changing it.

47 Unique values found
Prefixes are (ignoring the damned !) (count is one unless specified - count includes duplicates with distinct suffixes):
p,q (59),che (2),ch (10),sh (4),ksh (and one t! on f80r.P.28 which I will ignore)

Suffixes are (again ignoring the damned !) (count is one unless specified - count includes duplicates with distinct prefixes):
om,s,o,chey,osheey,dy (12),dyl,y(3),cheo,ol (2),oaiin,ches,dos,or (2),chcthy,olees,am (2),oaram,chd,aiino,dyl (2),fcho,arol,sar,ky,chy,chd

It appears 74 times with a prefix ignoring suffix. 62 times with a suffix ignoring prefix.
18 times with a prefix and NO suffix. 49 times with a suffix and NO prefix.
13 times with a prefix and a suffix. 84 times by itself.

So, taking the numbers above, we can postulate that otol is a function word; and furthermore, that it takes modifications with the affixes. This is logical, because it can appear either by itself, or in conjunction with affixes - they are obviously modifying the core word, otherwise, what is their function?

And yes, otol may very well be a fusion of ot/ol, except for the fact that it appears primarily as a single entity; and both ot and ol are affixes which do not run concurrently inthe corpus (according to a very quick visual examination by me). OK - so this is circular logic. But we have to draw the line somewhere. So the evidence points towards otol being a separate word.

I run a search for the prefixes in the corpus to see whether they are attaching themselves to other words.
They all appear thousands of times as prefixes. I'm not counting them.

I repeat the search for the suffixes in the corpus.
Again, they are all popular as suffixes.

But what is even more interesting is that the suffixes appear, at first glance, to have an order. Ch can be joined on with /ey,/eo,/es,/ct,/d, etc. It can then have further suffixes plugged in, so we see chcthy ch/ct/ch/y. Etc, etc. Prefixes don't do this as much - we get infrequent versions of them, but not such long constructs as the suffixes.

I take another word. Chol.

Chol is a more popular word, and has 165 distinct forms in the corpus. All of the affixes of otol appear in the list, plus quite a few more. Here is the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

So to sum up: we have a popular word (otol) which survives perfectly well by itself. Sometimes it has a prefix; sometimes a suffix. The appendages can be tagged onto one another, in a rhythm. These appendages appear tagged onto another even more popular word (chol).

It's a bold thought but - I'm going to suggest that we see here is evidence of a fusional grammer, where we get a content-word which is modified by prefixes and suffixes to give context to the original content-word.

I'm not just talking about declensions; this is evidence of a strongly synthetic language. I take as an example Spanish, with the perfectly natural word grabandomelo. You take the gerund of to record (grabar), add it to me and end up with this fuser word. It's not exactly the same process as we're seeing here - there are no prefixes and the Voynich verb, if it is a verb, doesn't seem to decline - but it's a similar process.

The next step is to build up a list of the affixes and see if we can develop a comprehensive index to them.

Hi David,
thank you for sharing your results!
I have been using linear correlation between occurrences in pages as a measure of the probability that two words are related. It's nothing particularly sophisticated, but at least it's a quantitative measure.

The variants you list are either quite rare (1 or 2 occurrences) or apparently unrelated with otol.
See for instance: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(0.0170 correlation)

qotol is just a little better (and also features a reduplicated occurrence):
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(0.1457)

A word that seems possibly correlated with otol is the o-less "variant" tol:
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(0.3120)

A non-otol example of more clearly correlated words could be pchedy and opchedy
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(0.6710)

The presence / absence of o- (otol/tol, opchedy/pchedy) seems to me the word variation that is most clearly explained by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. This really seems to be phonetic in nature. 
I think this is an area in which a huge amount of information still has to be extracted.

Well Marco, you say that, but

Quote:The variants you list are either quite rare (1 or 2 occurrences) or apparently unrelated with otol.
See for instance: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(0.0170 correlation)

Otoly appears in 11 distinct and undeniable cases.

Quote:qotol is just a little better (and also features a reduplicated occurrence):
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(0.1457)

qotol appears 53 times, and forms 9 variations
You can't really say that either of them are "rare", they are being used with a definite purpose within the corpus.

(22-09-2017, 09:06 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well Marco, you say that, but

Quote:The variants you list are either quite rare (1 or 2 occurrences) or apparently unrelated with otol.
See for instance: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(0.0170 correlation)

Otoly appears in 11 distinct and undeniable cases.

Quote:qotol is just a little better (and also features a reduplicated occurrence):
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(0.1457)

qotol appears 53 times, and forms 9 variations

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(46) qotol
(1) qotolo
(2) qotol!cheo
(1) qotoldy
(1) qotoly
(1) qotolol
(1) qotolaiin
(1) qotolchy
(1) qotolchd

You can't really say that either of them are "rare", they are being used with a definite purpose within the corpus.

No, I am not saying otoly and qotol are rare (this is why I chose them as examples). I am saying that they only rarely appear in the same pages as otol. I included voynichese.com links to illustrate the low correlation. So I don't see much evidence of them being semantically related with otol (but in this respect, as I wrote, qotol is distinctly better than otoly). Of course, it's just my personal opinion and everything is possible.

Well, you could argue that the French third person future of passer (IL passers) is rare in romance de la Rose, and unlikely to appear on the same page as je passe. Doesn't mean they aren't equally valid and as likely to appear in the same corpus.

Quote:davidjackson...

It's a bold thought but - I'm going to suggest that we see here is evidence of a fusional grammer, where we get a content-word which is modified by prefixes and suffixes to give context to the original content-word.

If you look at the Janus Pairs, you will see a high proportion of ot- vords in the zodiac section and a high proportion of ch- vords in the plant sections, so that seems to suggest something like this might be happening, but one also has to consider, when studying this angle, that many VMS tokens are short, and if the prefix and suffix are modifiers (which is certainly possible), then the "base" or "root" is often frighteningly short and often very repetitive (and sometimes nonexistent), as are many of the "suffixes".



Nevertheless, based on staring at the text for too many years and having created a database of the VMS "prefixes" and "suffixes" (which is a separate concept from Janus Pairs), I think this idea of "fusion grammar" may have validity and I would be supportive of anyone pursuing it.

(22-09-2017, 07:18 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[...]
Suffixes are (again ignoring the damned !) [...]

Hi David,

if the ! interlinear placeholder is disturbing, you can remove it easily by using "ivtt".
Your source file should be one of the ones listed  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , and since I see you are using the Takeshi file, you could use You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .
(Of course that one does not have the ! anymore ).

Anyway, were you to use the interlinear file (the only one with ! and %) then the command:

ivtt -b1 <input >output

will get rid of them.

Almost forgot the most important point....
Your regexp tool looks like something that is likely to be of general use.
If you let it ignore anything that appears between < and >, it can be used on all files in IVTFF format.

Cheers Rene!
Is that the updated TT file you mentioned in a post a while back? I was trying to find it last night to no avail.
I notice the commenting has changed in this version, do you have an explanation anywhere?

Sorry cross-edit.

A (rather long) explanation is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .
A detailed format description is (updated link: )  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

The short summary is  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I've started using that transcription file in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

It produces much the same as the old file.

Prefixes: p (1); q (9); che (1); ch (2); sh (2); ksh (1); cthe (1); t (1);
Suffixes: om (1); s (1); o (1); chey (1); osheey (1); dy (2); y (3); odal (1); cheo (1); ol (2); oaiin (1); ches (1); dos (1); or (1); chcthy (1); olees (1); am (1); aiin (2); oaram (1); chd (2); topar (1); opaiin (1); aiino (1); dyl (1); kshy (1); oty (1); fcho (1); arol (1); sheeos (1); sar (1); ky (1); chy (1);
Note: (n) refers to total count of occurrences in unique list, not occurrences in corpus.

All of the suffixes, in turn, can have their own suffixes when appearing in different configurations. It's like a frigging Mobius strip. But we knew that.