The Voynich Ninja

In most languages people use a (VSO) "Verb, Subject and Object".  Since we all don't know for sure what language the Voynich is derived from, including who the Author is of the VMS; am I asking a question for which there is no answer?

Can we say the VMS is a "free word order"?

However if we can determine the (VSO) type mathematically, this would point us all towards the languages to research against the VMS which utilizes "free word order".  I would assume random gibberish obeys "free word order".  There are languages that do obey "free word order".

Does anyone know of a python script which can determine through the use of an algorithm (VSO) of a text regardless if it is unknown?  To me there should be a model available yet I don't know where to look.

The VMS text seems to always start out consistent, however does the text obey certain (VSO) rules or is it free?

(01-10-2020, 02:46 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If a person knows only one language, then perhaps they think in terms of verb/subject/object, since it's a common structure but if you know several languages and some of them have other kinds of grammars, then after a while, you don't really think in terms of VSO, you just look at a sentence and it "computes" regardless of where the verb is placed.

Thanks JKP,

I already knew of the various OSV, SVO or VSO types for languages, yet my point was is the VMS a "free word order"? Furthermore, is there any python script available to act upon the VMS to verify this?

How can you evaluate word order if the identity of the VMS tokens is unknown?

We don't even know if there are vowels and consonants, and if there are, which ones are they?

Yeah at this stage it is absolutely impossible. 

Although it would be interesting to see a proposal, that's one theory we might actually learn something from.

Hi Voynichgibberish,
I find the subject of word order very interesting, but I agree with the others: at the current stage of our knowledge, it is difficult/impossible to tackle this at the grammatical level. I hope the Claire Bowern will be able to make progress in this line of research.

It is very likely that what we can say about Voynichese does not apply to the underlying language (assuming there is any).
Voynichese does not appear to have a "free word order". Evidence about this was originally pointed out by Currier. But most of the structure that can be detected points to preferences, sometimes strong preferences, rather than to "hard rules".
Some aspects in which word order appears to follow specific rules (counts based on the Zandbergen-Landini transliteration file ZL_ivtff_1r.txt):

* You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. appear as the first words of paragraphs. For instance, I count 55 occurrences of words that begin with p and contain a second gallows (e.g. potoy, pchofar, poeeockhey); 39 of these (i.e. 71%) appear at the beginning of paragraphs.
As another example, 119 paragraph start with a gallows-word followed by an o-word, e.g:
<f44r.8,+P0>      <%>pshy.opchey....
<f94r.1,@P0>      <%>tchedy.opaiir....
<f103r.24,+P0>    <%>tchoky.okeal....
<f113v.28,+P0>    <%>paiir.oteey....
No paragraph starts with an o-word followed by a gallows-word. If you swap the first two words in those 119 paragraphs you get something that appears to be "illegal".

* Something similar (though maybe less extreme) happens at line start. For instance, about half the occurrences of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are as the first word in a line.

* The last character of a word has an influence on the first character of the following word. This is the subject of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The best known preference is that -y tends to be followed by q-.
We have:
9 occurrences of sheedy.qokeedy and none of qokeedy.sheedy
8 occurrences of shey.qokey and only 1 of qokey.shey
6 occurrences of qokeedy.qokar and none of qokar.qokeedy
So, if you take a couple of words forming the -y.q- sequence and swap the two words, you are likely to produce a much rarer or possibly non-existent word sequence.

---

According to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., the words we see in the ms have been transformed according to the context they appear in. This of course makes it difficult to say anything about the structure of the underlying language: if Emma is right (as I believe) we should first find a way to map Voynichese words to their "ideal" untransformed structure.

I mentioned a very special side of word order when You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In that post I provisionally propose that Voynichese appears to belong to the Adjective-Noun AdjN family (like German and English), rather than to Noun-Adjective NAdj (like Latin and Italian). What I did is totally insufficient to provide any reliable information, but maybe further study of two-word labels could lead somewhere.

On the World Atlas of Language Structures you can generate maps comparing different language features, e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

I do not agree with this at all.
On f116, we have followed 2 VM words with german.
f17 German followed by 2 VM words ( even if it is hard to see. )
f66. Starts a sentence in VM and ends it in German.
If I listen to what the book is trying to tell me, it is not only possible but highly probable.
I don't see any reason why the author wants to make fun of someone.
And I don't need to wait for a result from a PC if the one feeding the PC has no idea.
And everything else explains the logic.

Translated with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (free version)

f17 is not German. It's closer to a mixture of French and Latin.

116v is a mixture of German, something that has the rhythm of a Romance language, Latin, Voynichese and then German again.

And none of it is grammatical.


If this is telling us anything, it is that we shouldn't jump to conclusions about how the main text is structured.

(01-10-2020, 10:32 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.f17 is not German. It's closer to a mixture of French and Latin.

116v is a mixture of German, something that has the rhythm of a Romance language, Latin, Voynichese and then German again.

And none of it is grammatical.

It probably *is* grammatical. At least I think that we should assume that.

I can assure you it is German.
It is also spelled correctly. There is a false division, but spoken is also correct.
Strictly speaking it is Bavarian dialect.
Whether Munich, Vienna or Graz, it is all Bavarian.
If you want to learn something about names of months, read from page 84 below.
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Hands off the recipe part if it's encoded, you wouldn't even notice the difference between German and Latin.

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