24-09-2026, 03:20 AM
In my opinion, the differences between Herbal A and Herbal B represent one of the most significant challenges in understanding the VM. Each contains words that are very common in one, but completely absent in the other. These changes go beyond simple word selection, as for example the bigram 'ed' is almost non-existent in Herbal A.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that Herbal A and B are not really different languages, and the differences can be explained by scribes encoding or spelling a group of common words in different ways.
For the last few days, I have been attempting to discover one of these 'transformation rules' that would repair the severed word distributions between the two different Herbals, and I think I have found a few that have compelling evidence.
I should also be clear -- these results are ONLY between Early Herbal A and Herbal B, the Later Herbal A / Pharma sections are not included. Some other work I've done, has led me to believe that Herbal B and other 'Currier B' sections contain significant differences comparable to those between Herbal A and B, so including them muddies the analysis. A natural follow-up is to see if similar transformations exist between Herbal A / Herbal B and other sections.
The rules:
Below, for convienience, i am going to refer to these rules as chy->edy, and chy->chdy, but i want to be clear that these are within-word-edits, not suffix swaps. This is not asserting that everything to the left of the edited portion is a common stem.
Lets go through the evidence:
They transform "Vanishing" A words into "Novel" B words, and the transformed words occur at roughly the same frequencies as the original.
I will explain this fully for the chy-> edy transformation, along with all of the data.
chy-> edy creates 17 pairs of A -> B words, each listed below.
For each pair of transformed words, we test (a) whether the frequency ORDER of the A words matches the order of their B forms, and whether the MAGNITUDE matches (the attested/predicted ratio, in both directions)
A word (rate in A | rate in B) ->B word (rate in A | rate in B), rates in per 10k words:
[*][attachment=17833]
Across these 17 pairs, the A frequencies correlate with the B frequencies: Spearman ρ = .758, permutation p = .0004, remaining significant after Holm correction across 14 comparisons (adjusted p = .0047). So the frequencies and rates do overlap, statistically.
The main takeaway's here are that common A words map to common B words. Rare A words map to rare b forms. This is necessary but not sufficient, as to some extent this is showing how common the initial portions of words are, but just bear with me and I will address all of this. Crucially, you can also see that B versions have no A correspondence, while some A versions have a small B correspondence.
You should also note that some expected -edy forms occur at roughly 1.65x the rate of the -chy forms, which i will also discuss below. The 2nd transformation from chy->chdy does not have this same property.
The same conditions all hold true for the chy->chdy transformation, these frequencies and rate overlaps are statistically significant, even after holm correction.
[attachment=17834]
Alternate forms exist in both directions, where grammar permits
As i mentioned in the previous section, -edy forms occur at roughly 2x -chy. This seems problematic, until you run the operation in reverse, try to replace -edy with -chy, then examine the missing forms.
Take for example, chedy. Running this operation in reverse, produces chchy, which fails the established slot grammar in Zattera 2022.
Chedy, shedy, cheedy and sheedy collectively account for about 40% of the missing token mass, and these can be matched to corresponding A words with a single operation, d insertion
B has 0 tokens containing ped, fed, ded, led, red or yed. ped and fed will be discussed in the next section. Ded, led, red, and yed are excluded by Zattera’s proposed formal grammar (2022, Figure 4). How then, would dchy move from Herbal A to B? We can see that it uses d insertion, chy->chdy, and NOT the chy->edy.
So now we have an explanation for why chy can go to either -edy or -chdy, as well as an explanation for the missing reversed forms of -edy in A. These rules appear to respect the known grammar of voynich, and attempt to avoid producing invalid words.
The transformations interact with other Voynich patterns as expected
This is where things get really interesting, and you may have already caught this in some of the examples of the previous seciton.
In her 2022 keynote, Lisa Fagin Davis proposed what I like to refer to as 'Davis expansion', that consists of the following rules:
P and F represent abbreviated forms of ke and te. BUT no abbreviation can be used before e, and no abbreviations can be used before d.
So for example using P to abbreviate keedy is strictly forbidden. How then, might an aspiring scribe, seek to use a P form for such a word? Is there simply no way?
Let us consider one of the rules from the previous section: chy->edy
What if we did something like keedy -> kechy -> pchy? This is now perfectly valid. In fact, P and F seem to affect the rest of the word, beyond Davis' proposed Te / Ke abbreviation, because these P/F forms appear to condition the word to use the ch over ed form.
In general, Herbal B authors tend to prefer ed over ch, except when it comes to P and F. So in certain contexts, the bench form appears to represent a preferred choice over edy, even for those that prefer edy.
A possible 3rd Rule
About 1/3 of the -chy tokens have no attested B form under either rule.
The higher count of these cases are:
These are fairly unique voynich words, and interestingly enough, they do have fairly obvious equivalents, involving 2 edits: changing the first o following a bench to an e, followed by one of the rules from the first section.
For example:
chokchy → chekchy → chekedy (5) or chekchdy 1.
In fact, this pathway seems to exist for virtually all of these words.
This initial e swap, after a bench, appears to have more examples, with different suffixes, and warrants more investigation to determine its full valid grammatical context:
Words without a bench, like ychy, seem to not be valid targets for this rule, and remain unexplained.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that Herbal A and B are not really different languages, and the differences can be explained by scribes encoding or spelling a group of common words in different ways.
For the last few days, I have been attempting to discover one of these 'transformation rules' that would repair the severed word distributions between the two different Herbals, and I think I have found a few that have compelling evidence.
I should also be clear -- these results are ONLY between Early Herbal A and Herbal B, the Later Herbal A / Pharma sections are not included. Some other work I've done, has led me to believe that Herbal B and other 'Currier B' sections contain significant differences comparable to those between Herbal A and B, so including them muddies the analysis. A natural follow-up is to see if similar transformations exist between Herbal A / Herbal B and other sections.
The rules:
- interior (ie non-initial) ch -> ed, followed by y (qokchy becomes qokedy, otchy becomes otedy, etc)
- interior (ie non-initial) ch -> chd, followed by y ( qotchy becomes qotchdy, qokchy becomes qokchdy)
Below, for convienience, i am going to refer to these rules as chy->edy, and chy->chdy, but i want to be clear that these are within-word-edits, not suffix swaps. This is not asserting that everything to the left of the edited portion is a common stem.
Lets go through the evidence:
They transform "Vanishing" A words into "Novel" B words, and the transformed words occur at roughly the same frequencies as the original.
I will explain this fully for the chy-> edy transformation, along with all of the data.
chy-> edy creates 17 pairs of A -> B words, each listed below.
For each pair of transformed words, we test (a) whether the frequency ORDER of the A words matches the order of their B forms, and whether the MAGNITUDE matches (the attested/predicted ratio, in both directions)
A word (rate in A | rate in B) ->B word (rate in A | rate in B), rates in per 10k words:
[*][attachment=17833]
Across these 17 pairs, the A frequencies correlate with the B frequencies: Spearman ρ = .758, permutation p = .0004, remaining significant after Holm correction across 14 comparisons (adjusted p = .0047). So the frequencies and rates do overlap, statistically.
The main takeaway's here are that common A words map to common B words. Rare A words map to rare b forms. This is necessary but not sufficient, as to some extent this is showing how common the initial portions of words are, but just bear with me and I will address all of this. Crucially, you can also see that B versions have no A correspondence, while some A versions have a small B correspondence.
You should also note that some expected -edy forms occur at roughly 1.65x the rate of the -chy forms, which i will also discuss below. The 2nd transformation from chy->chdy does not have this same property.
The same conditions all hold true for the chy->chdy transformation, these frequencies and rate overlaps are statistically significant, even after holm correction.
[attachment=17834]
Alternate forms exist in both directions, where grammar permits
As i mentioned in the previous section, -edy forms occur at roughly 2x -chy. This seems problematic, until you run the operation in reverse, try to replace -edy with -chy, then examine the missing forms.
Take for example, chedy. Running this operation in reverse, produces chchy, which fails the established slot grammar in Zattera 2022.
Chedy, shedy, cheedy and sheedy collectively account for about 40% of the missing token mass, and these can be matched to corresponding A words with a single operation, d insertion
- chedy can connect to chey by inserting d; it need not come from chchy.
- shedy can connect to shey.
- cheedy and sheedy can connect to cheey and sheey through d-insertion.
B has 0 tokens containing ped, fed, ded, led, red or yed. ped and fed will be discussed in the next section. Ded, led, red, and yed are excluded by Zattera’s proposed formal grammar (2022, Figure 4). How then, would dchy move from Herbal A to B? We can see that it uses d insertion, chy->chdy, and NOT the chy->edy.
- dchy 23 → dchdy 4; no dedy.
- opchy 6 → opchdy 3; no opedy.
- qopchy 5 → qopchdy 3; no qopedy.
- olchy 2 → olchdy 2
So now we have an explanation for why chy can go to either -edy or -chdy, as well as an explanation for the missing reversed forms of -edy in A. These rules appear to respect the known grammar of voynich, and attempt to avoid producing invalid words.
The transformations interact with other Voynich patterns as expected
This is where things get really interesting, and you may have already caught this in some of the examples of the previous seciton.
In her 2022 keynote, Lisa Fagin Davis proposed what I like to refer to as 'Davis expansion', that consists of the following rules:
P and F represent abbreviated forms of ke and te. BUT no abbreviation can be used before e, and no abbreviations can be used before d.
So for example using P to abbreviate keedy is strictly forbidden. How then, might an aspiring scribe, seek to use a P form for such a word? Is there simply no way?
Let us consider one of the rules from the previous section: chy->edy
What if we did something like keedy -> kechy -> pchy? This is now perfectly valid. In fact, P and F seem to affect the rest of the word, beyond Davis' proposed Te / Ke abbreviation, because these P/F forms appear to condition the word to use the ch over ed form.
In general, Herbal B authors tend to prefer ed over ch, except when it comes to P and F. So in certain contexts, the bench form appears to represent a preferred choice over edy, even for those that prefer edy.
A possible 3rd Rule
About 1/3 of the -chy tokens have no attested B form under either rule.
The higher count of these cases are:
- chokchy 13
- chotchy 12
- chochy 5
- ychy 4,shokchy 4; dchokchy 3.
- shtchy, shytchy, chopchy, torchy, chykchy, otorchy, {ct}chy and dpchy: 2 each.
These are fairly unique voynich words, and interestingly enough, they do have fairly obvious equivalents, involving 2 edits: changing the first o following a bench to an e, followed by one of the rules from the first section.
For example:
chokchy → chekchy → chekedy (5) or chekchdy 1.
In fact, this pathway seems to exist for virtually all of these words.
- chokchy 13 → chekedy 5, or chekchdy 1.
- chotchy 12 → chetedy 1, or chetchdy 1.
- chochy 5 → cheedy 2.
- shochy 1 → sheedy 8.
- chopchy 2 → chepchdy 1.
- shopchy 1 → shepchdy 1.
- chofchy 1 → chefchdy 1.
This initial e swap, after a bench, appears to have more examples, with different suffixes, and warrants more investigation to determine its full valid grammatical context:
- choky 19 → cheky 22.
- chokaiin 7 → chekaiin 5.
- chokey 3 → chekey 3.
- chotaiin 6 → chetaiin 1.
- shoky 2 → sheky 5.
Words without a bench, like ychy, seem to not be valid targets for this rule, and remain unexplained.