The Voynich Ninja

q is a bit of weird character, because it almost always appears at the beginning of words, followed by o. But the cases where q isn’t followed by o are even more interesting, because they seem to follow strict rules, not random as you’d expect from mistakes or outliers. I decided to look at q’s occurrences to see what the rules might be. 


qo: 5230 instances 
qf: 1 instance, followed by o (q links to o, possibly like a bench)
qk: 19 instances, some might be errors, they’re followed by o (8), e (6) or c (3), often with the q extending to the k or the letter after
qp: 2 instances, both seem to be transcription mistakes 
qt: 3 instances, all probably errors
qe: 66 instances, q often connects to the top of the e similarly to h
qc: 23 instances, at least some are mistakes
   qch: 4 instances, all seem to be errors 
   qckh: 9
   qcph: 2 
   qcth: 8
Everything else is has no instances. 

From this we can make a few conclusions: q appears before o or e, sometimes with k or f in between, or before the benched gallows ckh, cth or cph. 

This implies to me a few things: q affixes itself to certain word initial sounds, likely vowels. So, word initial o, e and benched gallows are vowels, or at least they sometimes start with a vowel sound. Word initial y is never a vowel or at least does not start with a vowel sound. k might be silent in some cases. Benched gallows are different from ch, and are composites beginning with e. Any of these conclusions could be wrong, but they are the initial impressions I get from this. 

If it hasn’t already been done, a look into whether or not qe words have q-less equivalents might yield interesting results. 

I got all the numbers from voynichese.com

When you say word initial vowel, do you mean a sound that only occurs at the beginning of words, or do you think positional variation is more likely? (Which would mean q is the word initial form of another character).

By word initial vowel I mean any vowel that’s the first letter of a word, not that the sound only appears at the beginning of words, sorry if that was unclear. 

As for q, I don’t exclude the possibility it might simply be a positional variant of another character, but I don’t see what it could be. I think q is more likely to be a word, sound or symbol that is specifically added in front of words that start with vowels, and was given its own character. (Though its sound could still occur in other circumstances, just represented by a different character) Like the french “ j’ “, which only occurs at the front of vowel initial verbs, or a liaison of some kind.