The Voynich Ninja

So, slightly off-beat theory here, but hear me out.

1) The character q almost always occurs at the beginning of a word.
2) It seems to have a grammatical rather than sound function.
3) If it has a sound, then that sound occurs nowhere else in Voynich words.

We can unite these points by proposing that q derives from Arabic waw. In Arabic, the conjunction 'and' is written with the letter waw joined to the beginning of a word. The conjunction 'and' was borrowed into several languages, notably Persian and Turkish, but also others due to the influence of Arabic. But the sound itself, often taken as /v/ rather than /w/, may have either been missing from the host language or not expressed in the same way (even today the sound /v/ is often found in loanwords in Turkish).

Thus we could be dealing with a language and script which borrowed this way of writing 'and' from Arabic. The best part is that the characters even look similar:

Voynich:
q

Arabic waw:


Bonus! Straight waw used for Tatar:

Quote:3) If it has a sound, then that sound occurs nowhere else in Voynich words.

Hi Emma,

I'm not familiar with Arabic, but I know that in Hebrew the corresponding sign "vav" can appear in the middle of words - can waw not? Just curious - I have no idea either way!

I mean that the sound does not otherwise exist in Voynichese, not Arabic.

My idea of Voynichese "4" is that it behaves like Latin -que, but only on the other end of the word. It behaves like a standalone unit that is added to the beginning of words only when words interact in a sentence. There are other explanations, but this is probably the simplest one.

Perhaps, if the aim of the script is brevity, it would make sense to adopt some form of this Arab glyph instead of "and", especially if the scribes were used to writing in several scripts (which is very likely either way). 

So I like this proposal a lot.

I just looked quickly at the first 20 pages of the Herbal (1v-10v) and counted where [qo] appears:

[qo] directly before a gallows: 84 times
[qo] not directly before a gallows: 25 times

Because of these statistics, I'm not sure I agree that [q] or [qo] mean "and" - there seems to be a disproportionate preference for Gallows characters (3 to 1)

Isn't that a logical consequence of (o)-gallows preferring word-initial position?

(25-09-2016, 09:38 PM)ThomasCoon Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I just looked quickly at the first 20 pages of the Herbal (1v-10v) and counted where [qo] appears:

[qo] directly before a gallows: 84 times
[qo] not directly before a gallows: 25 times

Because of these statistics, I'm not sure I agree that  [q] or [qo] mean "and" - there seems to be a disproportionate preference for Gallows characters (3 to 1)

That's a good observation.

I suppose one counter is that any word taking 'and' must be a noun. What if gallows were more common in nouns than other words?

A few observations about the positioning of the 4o vords...

• In some of the various "round" drawings (wheel shapes), the text within a spoke sometimes begins with 4o.
  
• Sequential 4o vords are particularly prevalent in 77r and 75r and many of the other pool pages.
  
• It's not uncommon for the 4o- vords to occur at the beginnings of lines and paragraphs (78v, 82r, 82v, 89r1, et al). In 83r, it occurs 4 times in a row at the beginning of a paragraph. In some languages, this would argue against an "and" interpretation. In others, it would not be as uncommon (in some languages the "and" precedes and sometimes attaches to the first word rather than the one  following) but even in those in which "and" comes before, it's not usually at the beginnings of paragraphs if the text is narrative in nature. In non-narrative text (e.g., lists), appearing at the beginning of a paragraph would be less unusual.
  
• 4o vords often skip over labels (as in small plant pages).
  
• On 76r, the 4 appears alone in the column to the left of the text.
  

Koen,
The problem seems to be that it would be unusual for a word meaning "and" to only prefer words beginning with certain letters. For example, -que in Latin can follow any letter (looking at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: -isque, -eque, -emque, -ique, -aeque, -oque, atque, -umque...).

Emma:

Quote:I suppose one counter is that any word taking 'and' must be a noun. What if gallows were more common in nouns than other words?

That's a possible solution. Perhaps the gallows represent four classes of nouns even - or they might just be definite articles (cf. los /la/las/el)

-JKP-
Thanks for the observations - you're right that the textual setup would point us towards certain interpretations and away from others . I never knew what to make of 4 alone on f76r....

Thomas - In that case I would argue that the "o" in itself is an article or something similar. In that case the surface appearance of "4o" as a meaningful unit would just be the result of "and" and an article being stuck to the beginning of words. I guess this ties in to the "gallows mark nouns" hypothesis.