The Voynich Ninja

(18-03-2019, 12:05 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.At a glance, f68r1 has "or daiin" star, and f68r2 has "odaiin" star. But that's interesting... although purely morphological guesses will leave us with too much uncertainty. E.g., one could think of "in" as a tense selector, say, to turn a verb into the past tense, the "in" is appended. That would automatically mean that all vords ending with "in" are verbs. That's just an illustration, "odaiin" most certainly precludes that. ("odaiin" is the second most frequent Voynich star, not some outsider).

It's interesting that you mention the stars in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , because I was struck by the *rarity* of the [-in] suffix only occurring twice in all of those star labels. In fact, that was where I first noticed the phenomenon. The [-in] suffix occurs much more frequently in the ms text as a whole.

Just so you know, I personally believe that [-in] or [-iin] is just the letter "-n" as the final letter of a word. I believe it is much *more* frequent as an inflectional ending, because "-n" is very common as a 3rd person plural verb ending, for example. But every once in a while it could also occur in a simple root word, without inflection.

Just for argument's sake, let's say that my hypothesis in the other thread is right, and the language is Greek, perhaps along the lines of Judaeo-Greek written in the Hebrew script. In this case the 3rd person plural verbs would all tend to end in "-n", and also the genitive plural noun forms would tend to end in "-n". Some of the accusative singular articles and pronouns would tend to end in "-n" as well. But the nominative case noun forms, the labels, would *not* tend to end in "-n".

Only one or two out of about 65 star name labels end in [-in]. I would not be surprised if one or two star names just happened to end in "-n", in Greek or in any language, especially if the names were borrowed from Hebrew, or Arabic, or some other language.

Quote:Geoffrey: Only one or two out of about 65 star name labels end in [-in]. I would not be surprised if one or two star names just happened to end in "-n", in Greek or in any language, especially if the names were borrowed from Hebrew, or Arabic, or some other language.

If they are labels (nouns, names), then MORE THAN LIKELY they are loanwords from Arabic. MOST star names were Arabic in the Middle Ages. Even in England, which was far removed from the Arabic world, most of the star names (among scholars and scribes who created and copied manuscripts) were Arabic.

I have lists of the old star names. Mostly Arabic. Many modern star names still go by the old Arabic names.

It's very tempting to think they are Arabic and that ot = "Al" but there are still issues to resolve (why so many of them with ot? why is the rest of the "name" so repetitious? so short? etc.).

(18-03-2019, 12:46 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Geoffrey: Only one or two out of about 65 star name labels end in [-in]. I would not be surprised if one or two star names just happened to end in "-n", in Greek or in any language, especially if the names were borrowed from Hebrew, or Arabic, or some other language.

If they are labels (nouns, names), then MORE THAN LIKELY they are loanwords from Arabic. MOST star names were Arabic in the Middle Ages. Even in England, which was far removed from the Arabic world, most of the star names (among scholars and scribes who created and copied manuscripts) were Arabic.

I have lists of the old star names. Mostly Arabic. Many modern star names still go by the old Arabic names.

It's very tempting to think they are Arabic and that ot = "Al" but there are still issues to resolve (why so many of them with ot? why is the rest of the "name" so repetitious? so short? etc.).

Good point, I agree about the Arabic star names. However, in Arabic the "al-" article prefix often assimilates to the following consonant, so that "al-d" can become "ad-d", "al-k" can become "ak-k", "al-s" can become "as-s", etc. In such cases, the "l" in "al-" would not necessarily show up in the name at all, depending on how the borrowing was written.

I mention Voynich stars because I've studied them some years ago, and I wrote an extensive You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about them, so for me those are the most familiar labels with some statistics at hand.

I would be very careful about considering labels as names, that is, as plain designations. JKP is right that we should be careful even about nouns, but I'd say that names are even unlikely. The "Voynich moons" of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are even more discouraging in that respect than Voynich stars, I believe I have posted about that in the forum, I can't see the way and haven't seen any successful attempt to map those into month names in any language. For the stars, consider "otol" which is the most frequent Voynich star, and it even is mentioned in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (along with "odaiin" which is second most frequent), and then it is seen in totally different visual contexts (see Section 3 of my article cited above), which quite precludes "otol" from being a designator for what is depicted. Rather, it (and any other Voynich star) is a reference to something which is not depicted. And the star names should be guessed (by the reader) by way of their positioning on the star map - just like plant names should be guessed through mnemonics.

(18-03-2019, 12:55 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I mention Voynich stars because I've studied them some years ago, and I wrote an extensive You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about them, so for me those are the most familiar labels with some statistics at hand.

I would be very careful about considering labels as names, that is, as plain designations. JKP is right that we should be careful even about nouns, but I'd say that names are even unlikely. The "Voynich moons" of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are even more discouraging in that respect than Voynich stars, I believe I have posted about that in the forum, I can't see the way and haven't seen any successful attempt to map those into month names in any language. For the stars, consider "otol" which is the most frequent Voynich star, and it even is mentioned in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (along with "odaiin" which is second most frequent), and then it is seen in totally different visual contexts (see Section 3 of my article cited above), which quite precludes "otol" from being a designator for what is depicted. Rather, it (and any other Voynich star) is a reference to something which is not depicted. And the star names should be guessed (by the reader) by way of their positioning on the star map - just like plant names should be guessed through mnemonics.

We have to keep in mind the possibility of homonyms: the same word "otol" could be the name of a star in a label, and a completely different word in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and elsewhere, and it just happens to be spelled the same way in the language of the Voynich ms. Likewise "odaiin" could be the name of a star in a label, and a completely different word in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and elsewhere, and it also just happens to be spelled the same way.

Yes, that's what I was writing back in 2015 of otol.

Quote:So otol appears to be a widely used notion, suitable for the following applications:

• serving as the name of some quite important celestial object;
  
• possibly also serving as morphological part of other star names;
  
• possibly serving for a certain generalization;
  
• serving for description (direct or by means of association) of a number of unidentified objects: anatomic/distillation (?), leaf/root of some plant (?);
  
• possibly serving as morphological part of description (direct or by means of association) of "personified" objects in the Zodiac pages.
  

What celestial body (Sun and Moon excluded) in what language could serve so many purposes at once? If a positive answer to this question is given, then that would be the confirmation of H5, let alone a huge advance in the Voynich research. If no valid candidates are discovered, it would be worthwile to re-consider H5 and look at some other system instead of "stars".

(Here "H5" stands for the hypothesis that star labels are star names).

---

One may call it "the otol test"

Researchers are exceedingly welcome to propose solutions to it.

(18-03-2019, 01:18 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yes, that's what I was writing back in 2015 of otol.

Quote:So otol appears to be a widely used notion, suitable for the following applications:

• serving as the name of some quite important celestial object;
  
• possibly also serving as morphological part of other star names;
  
• possibly serving for a certain generalization;
  
• serving for description (direct or by means of association) of a number of unidentified objects: anatomic/distillation (?), leaf/root of some plant (?);
  
• possibly serving as morphological part of description (direct or by means of association) of "personified" objects in the Zodiac pages.
  

What celestial body (Sun and Moon excluded) in what language could serve so many purposes at once? If a positive answer to this question is given, then that would be the confirmation of H5, let alone a huge advance in the Voynich research. If no valid candidates are discovered, it would be worthwile to re-consider H5 and look at some other system instead of "stars".

(Here "H5" stands for the hypothesis that star labels are star names).

---

One may call it "the otol test"

Researchers are exceedingly welcome to propose solutions to it.

Anton, if you have managed to read through all the details of my hypothesis in the "Greek You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1" thread, you may be aware that I believe the language of the ms may be Greek, but in the form of Judaeo-Greek, that is, written similarly to the way it was written in the Hebrew script. Unfortunately, the Hebrew script was not well-suited to the Greek language, in particular to all of the Greek vowels. Even worse, writers using the Hebrew script often omitted the vowel diacritic dots, making any Judaeo-Greek text even more ambiguous. I believe this may be the kind of thing we are dealing with in the Voynich ms.

So unfortunately, in the word [otol], I believe the character [o] might represent "o" or "a" or "au" in Judaeo-Greek. Also unfortunately, I'm afraid the Voynich script did not even distinguish between voiced and voiceless consonant pairs, so the character [t] might represent "k" or "g" in Judaeo-Greek. Finally, [l] is one of the most difficult characters for me to determine in my hypothesis: I think it is likely to be "n" or "s" (either one or the other, not both), but I cannot be completely sure which one it is yet.

Let us suppose that [l] represents "n". In this case under my hypothesis [otol] could represent any of the following things in Judaeo-Greek:

"okon"
"ogon"
"okan"
"ogan"
"okaun"
"ogaun"
"akan"
"agan"
"akon"
"agon"
"akaun"
"agaun"
"aukon"
"augon"
"aukan"
"augan"
"aukaun"
"augaun"

Even more ambiguously, in the Hebrew script there could have been an additional final vowel, which might not have been indicated in the script at all, if vowel diacritic dots were not written. So you could add a final vowel to any of the above words, and in this kind of script, it still could have been written [otol] !

Alternatively, if [l] represents "s" rather than "n", one can repeat the above list, replacing "n" with "s" in each word. Also, an additional final vowel could be added to any of the words in this case as well.

Also, keep in mind that "o" is the Greek masculine article "the" (nominative singular). So the first letter "o" in any of the above words might just be the article "the", rather than part of the root word itself.

I must say that my knowledge of Greek, let alone the Judaeo-Greek, is far less than even that of English, so can you please clarify if something can be picked out this word list that would suit the different contexts in which otol is mentioned?

Something that can be done: it manifests itself that paragraph-initial vords often start with gallows. This is not always, but the majority is overwhelming and, judging by glance, is over 90%. On the contrary, non-paragraph-initial vords do not often start with gallows, although they contain gallows quite often.

So:

1) Calculate the share of paragraph-initial vord ocurrences starting with gallows in the total of all paragraph-initial vord occurrences.
2) Make a list of all paragraph-initial vords not starting with gallows and see if this list looks interesting in any respect
3) Calculate the total of all vord occurrences starting with gallows and look what share of those occur as non-paragraph-initial.
4) Calculate the degree of uniqueness of all paragraph-initial vords, and/or, more globally, of all vords starting with gallows. Check if uniqueness is correlated with being started with gallows.

I've done something to that direction You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but I was then more anxious about the PPNs (potential plant names), so the focus was on first vords of botanical folios. However, a cursory check suggested that first vords of paragraphs on the whole exhibit high degree of uniqueness.