The Voynich Ninja

Hello Voynich Ninja forum,

First time poster and just joined the forum. I've been interested in the Voynich for a while now and wanted to run a little something by the group here to see if anyone else has noticed it as well.

I was looking at the character "9", which I'm sure we all know occurs at the end of a word like ~88% of the time we see it in the text.

Then I started looking at bigram suffixes ending in 9 and found this-- 

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [attachment=12015]

Which shows that, obviously 89 is a super common word ending (44% of 9-ending words are 89).

Then, looking at the second most common, c9, I noticed that the same c9 pattern appears in many of the next most common 9-ending suffixes 

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[attachment=12016]

c9, C9, 19, D9, H9, K9 and so on. So, really, we might think of the true distribution of 9-ending suffixes to be something like this-- 

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[attachment=12017]

Curious what the general sense is about the 9 character is around here, like whether it likely has a distinct phonological value or if its merely some orthographically fixed spelling convention.

Sorry if this is really basic/already explored.

Wow, I thought you were dead. I have some questions to ask you about stegnographia.

(04-11-2025, 06:48 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Wow, I thought you were dead. I have some questions to ask you about stegnographia.

Hay to the ox and sugar to the parrot.

I might have something to say about words ending ey. But are you able to attach the images instead of giving links to imgur.com ? 

imgur.com has blocked its content to people here in the UK.

(04-11-2025, 07:38 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I might have something to say about words ending ey. But are you able to attach the images instead of giving links to imgur.com ? 

imgur.com has blocked its content to people here in the UK.

Ah yeah, sorry, I updated my OP.

It is not going to be easy to try to explain the high frequency of  ey or dy. These are two of a number of character pairs that occur more often than expected. The matrices of character affinities for Herbal A1 and Bio B2 that I gave [ You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ] show how much each character has a liking for every other character in those sections.

Some character pairs don't occur as often as they look as though they should. Why don't  ay, oy, le occur more often? Until someone can explain all these affinities then there will probably not be any great advancement in understanding ey and dy.

Welcome to the forum!  Just as a recommendation, it would be handy to familiarize yourself with the EVA alphabet, which is what most people of the forum use to communicate unambiguously about the text. It is also used on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

There are others here who know much more about common glyph patterns than I do. Two things I can think of:

* This should probably not be considered without also taking into account the common [edy] ending (which you'd call c89), which accounts for over half of all [dy] endings. So are we looking at omission of [d] in the case of [ey]?
* dy-type endings are the main marker between Currier A and B. They are important in some way, but knowing how would probably mean solving the MS...

(04-11-2025, 09:41 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Welcome to the forum!  Just as a recommendation, it would be handy to familiarize yourself with the EVA alphabet, which is what most people of the forum use to communicate unambiguously about the text. It is also used on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

There are others here who know much more about common glyph patterns than I do. Two things I can think of:

* This should probably not be considered without also taking into account the common [edy] ending (which you'd call c89), which accounts for over half of all [dy] endings. So are we looking at omission of [d] in the case of [ey]?
* dy-type endings are the main marker between Currier A and B. They are important in some way, but knowing how would probably mean solving the MS...

Thanks for the welcome and for the advice. I'll use EVA around here for greater clarity, though, I somtimes feel like neither transliteration system is optimal.

Thank you for the thoughts on triagraphic y endings, I'll look into that as well.

I'm sure you've already seen this kind of thing before, but I also found that certain words with edy endings are often doubled -- (sorry for the graph's legend in non-EVA)

[attachment=12026]

[attachment=12027]

It made me think of how sometimes you see doublings in recipes in latin texts, for example (im making this up, but could find examples)

Aqua aqua quae fluit de monte illo est calida et sulphurea -- the water, the water that flows from the mountain is hot and sulfurous

or 

Balneum, balneum calidum et medicinale; balneum balneum frigidum sterilitatem facit -- the bath, the bath is hot and medicinal; the bath, the bath that is cold causes sterility.

By the way, I'm not offering a translation or anything here. I'm just sharing thoughts. I know how easily attempting to translate words like this breaks down when you put it to the test. I'm not new to the Voynich, just new to this forum.

(04-11-2025, 06:47 PM)Trithemius Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Curious what the general sense is about the 9 character is around here, like whether it likely has a distinct phonological value or if its merely some orthographically fixed spelling convention.

From my research I found that 9 (EVA: y) has a couple of traits. 

1. It will often start or end words, but is much rarer to find in the middle. 

The next point is a bit abstract so I will use an image. 

[attachment=12033]


2. You generally won't find it interacting with "i" (or "a"). 
Glyphs with the building block of "i" (noted in image) you will tend to not find it being a precursor for. 
However in the cases it is, these tend to be in the final half of lines or predominantly. 
It is less rare following on from some of these glyphs, however they will still tend to be in the final half of lines or predominantly.

3. In bulk text "y" seems to be a common precursor to a "gallows glyph" (pfkt) and d. 
4. At the starts of lines "y" can be a common precursor to "sh" and "ch", but very rarely away from the start of a line. 

I'm not one for stats, but if you use the site Koen linked you can check for yourself. 
The stats guys will also pull me up if I have taken a misstep here  , but I think I'm safe (hopefully!)

My "general sense" is that it mostly a precursor for "pfktd" unless "sh,ch" which tend to be glued to the starts of lines.
I'd also note that is rarely found as a precursor for "cXh" glyphs, with X being "pfkt". 

Also take care with the website linked, there's a fair few possible spaces in words which are taken as whole words as well as a fair few mistakes/errors. It's good overall but just double check

Edit - Just noticed this is asking about it as a suffix.. sorry! hopefully some of it is useful anyway.

(04-11-2025, 11:43 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The next point is a bit abstract so I will use an image.

You mean like this:

[attachment=12039]

(That is from a tech report I was writing 20 years ago and never finished.)  I changed my views a bit since then.  For one thing, now I believe that ideally h is a single stroke too, and the ligature is not a separate stroke.  Thus ch and ih are two strokes, not three, and should replace the last column of that table.

All the best, --stolfi