It came to my mind that even if the vords in the cypher manuscript would be hard to decode,
perhaps a combinatorial analysis of prospective grammatical gender would give a limited number of comparative grammatical gender tables for further analysis.
For example it is tempting to think of the text as Greek-like because of the common prefix 'o' (nominative masculine definitive article) but this is also equally deceptive if 'o' is something else entirely.
Therefore, I would like to invite the Voynich Ninja members to share in this thread their thoughts on the grammatical gender system of the cypher manuscript.
I don't think the grammatical structure will be made visible by just rewriting prefixes and suffixes. Any mapping from a prefix or suffix to syllables or any morpheme will render reduplications like qokeedy qokedy qokeedy a bunch of nonsense, and it was already discussed iirc that using characters e.g. edy as markers would make the plain text also repetitive, as the grammatical case marked by say, edy, would be used way too frequently for the languages we are considering, whatever that grammatical case may be
One fun way to think about Voynichese is this: if you remove everything that looks like common grammatical endings, affixes... then what is left? Where are the variable roots of Voynichese words?
Labelese-ish ?
(hopefully)
To me it looks intuitively closer to roman numerals or any cipher involving numbers, but I don't have any stats to back that up
Are there some structural/statistical analysis available on recurring prefixes or suffixes?
Addsamuels made a thread with some data about a Prefix / Suffix Tree --> You are not allowed to view links.
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Let's list some frequency oddities (using v101):
1) y o (with space) occurs 2778 times while yo (no space) occurs only 29 times.
2) dy occurs 4912 times while yd occurs only 160 times.
3) aiin occurs 3844 times while oiin occurs only 159 times.
etc.
Please share more examples of frequency imbalance to pinpoint possible 'grammatical rules' (if any).
(04-04-2025, 08:12 AM)Dobri Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Therefore, I would like to invite the Voynich Ninja members to share in this thread their thoughts on the grammatical gender system of the cypher manuscript.
Can you please clarify what "the grammatical gender system" is?
(22-04-2025, 11:28 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (04-04-2025, 08:12 AM)Dobri Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Therefore, I would like to invite the Voynich Ninja members to share in this thread their thoughts on the grammatical gender system of the cypher manuscript.
Can you please clarify what "the grammatical gender system" is?
For example, in the Greek language, there are three genders: masculine (αρσενικό), feminine (θηλυκό), and neuter (ουδέτερο).
The definitive articles in Greek are: ο (masculine), η (feminine), and το (neuter).
They change depending on the grammatical case (nominative, genitive, and accusative), though they all translate to the English word “the.”
The indefinite articles in Greek are: ένας (masculine), μια/μία (feminine), and ένα (neuter). They also get inflected according to the case.
The question is whether prefixes and suffixes in the cipher manuscript change according to a grammatical gender (like in Latin, Italian, German, French, Spanish, etc.) or not (like in English).
If one assumes a one-to-one correspondence between Voynichese and plain text words, Koen found that MATTR gives interesting results.
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Later the method was discussed in "Crux of the MATTR: Voynichese Morphological Complexity" by Luke Lindemann.
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His conclusions:
Quote:Voynichese possesses a middle range of morphological complexity that is somewhat higher than the average for Romance and Germanic but lower than Semitic and Slavic. On both the high and low side of the spectrum, we can effectively eliminate the Phillipine and Turkic languages, and most likely the Uralic and Celtic languages as well. Romance remains a possibility, although Voynich appears somewhat below Latin but higher than what we find from the majority of the modern Romance languages.
So MATTR measures are not conclusive. Excluding very small windows (where Voynichese is affected by the crazy repetition rates) the text appears to fall between highly and moderately inflected languages (it behaves differently from something as little inflected as English). But, in my opinion, the frequency of consecutive repetitions is a major problem for a one-to-one word relationship with a European plain-text.