Marco correctly emphasized the need to "start from function words" in the other thread, and so I want to return to this point here, as I explore this Middle English hypothesis, to see if it really is just an amusing joke, as I first thought, or if there really is something to this idea.
As I mentioned and repeated in the other thread, I stumbled upon the Middle English scribal abbreviation "ẏ" for the definite article "ye" / "the" You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.. And it actually would make so much sense if EVA [ch-] as a prefix represented this Middle English dotted "y" standing for the article "ye" / "the". Then [chey] and/or [chy] could represent the article "ye" / "the" as an independent word. And it would still be consistent with [chedy] = Middle English "yes", although I must note that [chedy] could also be "yese" meaning "these" in this interpretation (as in fact I interpreted it in [chedykar] in the second line of You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. above, although the point of this post is to get away from the line by line interpretations for the moment).
If I mention the idea of [chedy] = "yes", then I really should also point out that [qokain] / [qokaiin] = "no" also fits very well within my Germanic reading system as it already currently stands. Both words are overwhelmingly frequent in Dialect B, and in the bathing women section and the final (so-called "Recipes") section in particular.
If [chedy] = "yes", then the ending [-dy] could simply represent the English plural ending "-s". If my Northern Middle English dialect hypothesis above is correct, the "-es" ending would also appear both on 3rd person singular and on general plural verb forms, making this ending overwhelmingly ubiquitous throughout the text.
[daiin] / [dain] would be "so" in this interpretation, as indeed I interpreted the latter form in the first word of the second line of You are not allowed to view links.
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I observe that the vord EVA [aiin] is often followed by a vord beginning with [ch-], especially in the final (so-called "Recipes") section. Consistent with the above interpretations, [aiin] = "o", and actually this could be English
o' , the abbreviation for "of" or "on", well-known in phrases such as "o'clock" or "top o' the mornin", etc. This would neatly explain the combination [aiin ch-] as "o' y" = "of the"!
I should also note here that
o' is present as well in the now-extinct "Forth and Bargy dialect", also known as "Yola", an Anglic language in County Wexford, Ireland, descended from Middle English and established in that region as early as the 12th century.
The vord EVA [ol] is the second most frequent vord in the entire Voynich ms, but it is overwhelmingly more frequent in the bathing women section than anywhere else, as far as I can tell. It is plausible that [ol] = English "us", a logical word to be used often in dialogue in the bathing women section. Furthermore, [-ol] as a suffix in general could represent the English adjective suffix "-ous".
I will stop here for now. There is much more to investigate. But the connections between the most frequent Voynich ms text vords, prefixes & suffixes, and the most common Middle English function words, appear to be very promising indeed.
Geoffrey C.
Just one more Middle English word idea to share:
If as I suggest above EVA [ol] = "us", and the ending [-ol] = the suffix "-ous", then the frequent vord [chol] seems a tough nut to crack.
But...there is the idea [chol] = Middle English "jus", which can mean "natural liquid"; "liquid of a plant"; "herbal decoction or extract"; and "bodily fluid or secretion". (This of course became the modern English word "juice".)
And indeed -- in contrast with the other vords I discussed above such as [ol], [chedy], [qokain], [qokaiin], which occur so frequently in the bathing women section -- the vord [chol] on the other hand rather occurs rarely in the bathing women section, but relatively much more frequently in the Herbal section and in the Pharmaceutical section.
Geoffrey C.
For those who are interested, I have collected my list of possible connections between Voynich ms text frequent vords and Middle English common function words and other logical common words, in the format of a draft document, which is the attachment to this post.
I have added notes about the frequency positions of the Voynich vords in the bathing women section, the two parts of the final section (called "Stars-B" and "Stars-Bio" in the source link to follow), the Dialect A (main) part of the herbal section, the Dialect B (smaller) part of the herbal section, and the pharmaceutical section. The source for these frequency statistics by section is You are not allowed to view links.
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The most interesting new observation in the attached draft document is the following: Readers may have noticed in my proposed correspondences that both EVA [d] and EVA [l] represent Middle English "s", for example in [chedy] = "yes" ; [-dy] suffix = "-s" ; [-edy] suffix = "-es" ; [daiin] = "so" ; but also [ol] = "us" ; [-ol] suffix = "-ous" ; and [chol] = "jus".
Here is my hypothesis to explain the representation of Middle English "s" by both EVA [d] and EVA [l] :
"Hypothesis: EVA [d] and EVA [l] characters are two different forms of "s". This may possibly be compared to the now archaic "long s" ("ſ") and now standard "short s" ("s") forms of "s" in English. Observe that EVA [l] is more frequent in word-final position, and EVA [d] is more frequent in other positions, consistent with the formerly common practice of "short s" in word-final position and "long s" in most other positions in English. For those who are not already well familiar with the actual forms of the Voynich ms text characters, EVA [d] is a tall character and EVA [l] is a short character."
Geoffrey C.
The following idea about the Middle English hypothesis is even more tentative than the preceding ones, because it relates to the notoriously complicated character combination EVA [sh], which has multiple apparent forms. Nevertheless, if I am relating the most frequent Voynich vords to the most common English function words and other logical common words, I must have some explanation for the frequency of EVA [shedy], et al. So here is this very tentative hypothesis:
As I suggest that EVA [ch] = Middle English "y" or perhaps in some cases "j" ("jus"),
perhaps then EVA [sh] = Middle English "th" ?
If so, this would explain all of the following most frequent Voynich vords beginning with [sh] quite well, it seems:
EVA [shedy] = Middle English "thes" / "these"
EVA [shey] = Middle English "the"
EVA [shol] = Middle English "thus" !
EVA [sheey] = Middle English "thee"
EVA [sho] = Middle English "thu" / "thou" !
Please note: This new analysis of EVA [sh] would mean that my tentative interpretations of the first two lines of text on You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. , posted previously in this thread, are now obsolete. This is a good example of the need to be cautious in proceeding with such hypotheses: Indeed it is better to focus on identifying function words first, before attempting to read and interpret passages of text.
Geoffrey C.
I just began a new thread about lipogrammatic texts in general, in which an author uses only words which do not contain a certain letter (or letters). The idea is worth considering generally in regard to the Voynich ms text, regardless of which language the text is written in. I mentioned in passing there that this idea occurred to me while investigating the possibility of a Middle English text written using only words that do not contain the letter "a".
Although the transparent hypothesis of EVA [a] = actual "a" has always seemed both natural and fitting to me, seeming at first appearance to work fairly well, relatively speaking, with the various language hypotheses that I have considered over the years, a Middle English hypothesis actually raises serious problems with this idea, and perhaps with the occurrence of the letter "a" in the text in general.
First of all, the obvious question: where and what is the indefinite article "a"? Now it could have been written "an" more often and more generally than it is in modern English, but Chaucer for example simply used "a" very frequently, and he is about as close to the timeframe of the Voynich ms text as we can hope to get among the most prominent Middle English authors (along with Wycliffe). Nor do I find a good candidate for the word "an" either. Nor do I find a promising proposal for prefixing this article, as EVA [a], to its noun in the same way that I find the promising idea of EVA [ch-] as a prefixed definite article representing the Middle English abbreviation dotted "y" for "ye"/"the".
But the issue of "a" actually came to my attention as I considered the frequent Voynich ms vords EVA [ar], [dar], [al], and [dal]. I still think EVA [r] = Middle English "r" works well, for example it extends naturally to the frequent Voynich ms vords [or] = "our" and [chor] = "your". Now while one might think that [ar] = "ar" is surely an alternate spelling of "are" in Middle English...actually, it's not. Rather "are" was the alternate spelling of the primary form "aren". The form "ar" was rather only an alternate spelling of Middle English "here" -- meaning modern English 'their'! -- but only in certain dialects in Kent, West Midlands, and that curious "Yola" or "Forth and Bargy dialect" in Ireland. Moreover, the vord EVA [ar] occurs most frequently in the final (so-called "Recipes" or "Stars") section, as well as in Herbal B, but NOT frequently at all in the bathing women section. It seems strange that a word meaning "their" would be rare in a section full of illustrations of an obviously plural group of people, but frequent elsewhere.
Even more of a problem is the vord EVA [dal] = "sas" ?! if [a] = "a". Now I can find perfectly good Dutch, French, and Swedish words "sas", but not in English! (The word "sass" is more modern, comes from "sauce", and the Middle English forms all had the letter u/w/l in them between the "a" and the second "s".) I would have to stretch to argue that French "sas" meaning "sieve" or "lock (of canal)" was somehow used repeatedly throughout the herbal, pharmaceutical, and bathing women sections of the Voynich ms.
And so, I arrive at the hypothesis that perhaps EVA [a] actually does not represent Middle English "a", but rather "i"! This would give us EVA [ar] = "ir" meaning 'her' (an alternate spelling of "hire"), and it actually makes sense that such a singular form could be frequent in the final section and elsewhere, but not in the bathing women section where the people are plural and when they would address each other in the singular, they would use 2nd person rather than 3rd person forms. As for EVA [dal], now we have Middle English "sis" -- an actual word derived from Old French "sis" meaning 'six' -- and meaning in Middle English "a throw of six in dice; the highest throw"; also "good fortune", and further part of the phrase "sis foil" meaning "a design or device in the form of a plant having six leaves". Now I have not checked every occurrence of EVA [dal] in the Voynich ms text to see if there is any apparent connection to illustrations of six women or plants with six leaves, but at least this is a more promising possibility than a sieve or lock of a canal that is not even a Middle English word at all.
The EVA [a] = Middle English "i" hypothesis also gives us the natural [al] = "is" correspondence. (English "as" would not be bad, but this is even better.) Finally, according to this hypothesis, EVA [dar] = Middle English "sir"! I actually have mixed feelings about this one, since with [a] = "a", Middle English "sar" as an alternate form of "sore" meaning 'sore, hurting, in pain' would actually be a good semantic fit as well for the herbal and pharmaceutical sections where it occurs with great frequency. Still, as the 10th most frequent vord in the entire Voynich ms text, a standard formal term of address such as "sir" that can be repeated over and over again may be a more likely candidate than a particular adjective, no matter how well suited it is semantically to the sections where it occurs frequently. (Test: [dar] occurs 72 times in the bathing women section. Is this more likely to be "sir" or "sar"='sore'?)
So there you have it. What do you think? Do you prefer "ar", "sas", "as", and "sar", or rather "ir", "sis", "is", and "sir"? If it is the latter, then perhaps the Voynich ms text is a lipogrammatic Middle English text composed without the use of any word containing the letter "a".
Geoffrey C.
Here is a very provisional example of a possible Voynich EVA character : Middle English letter correspondence table for a text with no use of the English letters ABC :
EVA [e] = Middle English “e”
EVA [aiin] / [ain] = Middle English “o”
EVA [o] = Middle English “u” / “ou”
EVA [a] = Middle English [font=Trebuchet MS]“i”[/font]
EVA [ch] = Middle English “y” / “j” / [font=Trebuchet MS]“g” ?[/font]
EVA [sh] = Middle English “th” / [font=Trebuchet MS]“sh” (and for “ch”) (different shapes of EVA [sh] ! )[/font]
EVA [d] = Middle English “long s” (and for [font=Trebuchet MS]“c” ! )[/font]
EVA [l] = Middle English “short s”
EVA [qok] = Middle English “n”
EVA [qot] = Middle English [font=Trebuchet MS]“m”[/font]
EVA [r] = Middle English “r”
EVA [ok] = Middle English [font=Trebuchet MS]“d”[/font]
EVA [k] = Middle English [font=Trebuchet MS]“t”[/font]
EVA [t] = Middle English [font=Trebuchet MS]“p”[/font]
EVA [ot] = Middle English [font=Trebuchet MS]“f” / “v”[/font]
EVA [s] = Middle English [font=Trebuchet MS]“l” ?[/font]
Geoffrey S.
The status of the Voynich EVA character : Middle English letter correspondence table needs to be updated now to reflect the different confidence levels of certain groups of correspondences. I am most confident in those correspondences which fit well with numerous Middle English function words, and which are confirmed with such fitting readings as EVA [aror sheey] = Middle English "irour thee~" meaning "wrath for thee" on You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. and EVA [otol] = Middle English "fous" meaning "ardent (shining, glowing, burning), zealous, passionate; brave, noble; dying; ready to depart, die" and "eager, willing, ready; striving forward".
Thus this is the group of the most confident correspondences:
EVA [o] = Middle English "ou" / "u"
EVA [e] = Middle English "e"
EVA [r] = Middle English "r"
EVA [a] = Middle English "i"
some EVA [sh] = Middle English "th"
EVA [d] = Middle English "long s"
EVA [l] = Middle English "short s"
EVA [ch] = Middle English "y"
confident:
EVA [aiin] / [ain] = Middle English "o"
EVA [ot] = Middle English "f" (on the basis of the perfect semantic fit of [otol] = "fous")
critical:
EVA [qok] = Middle English "n" ?
less confident:
EVA [t] = Middle English "p" ?
EVA [k] = Middle English "t" ?
EVA [ok] = Middle English "d" ?
EVA [qot] = Middle English "m" ?
other EVA [sh] = ?
EVA [s] = ?
EVA [cth] = ?
EVA [ckh] = ?
EVA [y] = null / silent "e" / other ?
EVA [m] = ?
EVA [g] = ?
It is important to keep in mind the different confidence levels of the various groups of correspondences when considering, for example, various possible hypotheses about the Voynich ms as a lipogrammatic text in which certain letters may be absent from the ms and from the writing system entirely, and other letters may be present in the ms and in the writing system, but may be intentionally absent on certain pages. See the discussion between myself and nablator in the "Lipogrammatic text" thread.
Geoffrey
Explanatory note for those reading and catching up with this thread:
For what I now consider the relatively more serious (or rather less unserious) analysis of the Middle English hypothesis, please begin with You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. at the top of page 3 of this thread. My posts prior to this message followed the mistaken approach of prematurely attempting to "interpret" individual lines of text using excessive degrees of freedom in the interpretation, following the mistaken method of what the more experienced analysts of the Voynich ms text on this forum (Rene, Marco, Koen, Anton, JKP, Emma, and many others) often describe as the "four-step process" or "word salad" method of "reading", "interpreting", and "translating" the Voynich ms text. I have tried this process before, with completely different languages, and it has not worked. If I or anyone else is to make any progress with this Middle English hypothesis, we (read: I) must adopt better and more rigorous methods of investigation and analysis of the ms text. I'm sure I have still made mistakes even after the message I refer to as the proper starting point for the relatively more serious (or rather less unserious) consideration of the Middle English hypothesis in this thread. But I hope that those mistakes are less fatal and more fixable than the type of methodological errors committed prior to that point. I welcome the feedback and contributions of all who are interested in analyzing this hypothesis. The feedback of those with critical and skeptical perspectives is especially welcome. Thank you for your patience with my many mistakes and methodological errors. I appreciate it very much.
Geoffrey
f65r is the page with only three words of text on it, by the bottom left leaf, near the root of the plant
EVA:
[otaim dam alam]
reading by my provisional Middle English correspondences:
"fo[?] si[?] isi[?]"
(in line with [otol] = "fous", [aror sheey] = "irour thee~", and function words I have discussed in the "problematic...Germanic" thread, beginning on page 3 of that thread)
I researched Middle English words for which such words would all have the same final letter, and found the following:
"fob sib isib"
Middle English
fob "cheat, trickster, deceiver"
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Middle English
sib "related by blood or marriage; of a branch or bough: of kin to (the root), linked"
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Middle English
isib "related, akin; closely related"
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This reading of "deceiver/cheat related by blood or marriage, closely related" seems to fit well with the dispute between the House of York and the House of Lancaster in 15th century England. The so-called "Wars of the Roses" were actually known as the "War of the Cousins" by contemporary sources during the period.
Also, the extended meaning of "sib" as "of a branch or bough: of kin to (the root), linked" seems to relate very fittingly to the illustration on the page and the location of these words of text.
Geoffrey
![[Image: Filipendula65r.png]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Filipendula65r.png)