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Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B - npcompl33t - 24-09-2026
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:
- 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:
[*]
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.
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.
RE: Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B - Jorge_Stolfi - 24-09-2026
(24-09-2026, 03:20 AM)npcompl33t wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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.
That would be a very valuable result! Meanwhile, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is what could be a first step in that direction: a set of "projection rules" that seem to map both A and B to the same language (but with massive loss of information).
It is my belief that the VMS is a compilation of 4-5 separate books, originally written by different people in different epochs and places, which were transcribed/translated by the Author into the same language and script that he devised. Specifically, I believe that each of the sections Astro/Cosmo, Zodiac, Bio/Balneo, Pharma, and Starred Parags was a separate "ur-book"; and Herbal was two separate books. Although Pharma may have been just a brief summary of one or both of the Herbal books.
If this hunch is true, then the differences between Herbal A and B may be due to a "spelling reform" that the Author did between transcribing the two books; or to differences between the dialect or pronunciation of the two ur-books; or to differences in the style and format of the entries. Like, consider the following way to write the same herbal info:
- If it is boiled and taken with honey, it will cure baldness
- To cure baldness, boil it and take it with honey
- Boiling it and taking it with honey cures baldness
All the best, --stolfi
RE: Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B - nablator - 24-09-2026
If you want to explain all ed you also need a transformation such as ey->ed to account for the final ed (without y at the end).
But then how to explain the many eda? A possible solution is to append a word starting with a (al, ar, aiin) after some of the "ed" endings generated by the previous rule.
(24-09-2026, 03:20 AM)npcompl33t wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Words without a bench, like ychy,
You mean ydy? yty?
RE: Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B - Skoove - 24-09-2026
I'm not sure that an A to B map is possible since we see considerable evidence of 'transitionary' stages between the two (I know Rene has a good explanation of this on his site).
Perhaps this is not the right thread for this question but I did just wonder, has anyone seen if word frequency (i.e. the way we discovered and differentiate between A and B) correlates with the scribal hand (the 5 scribes that Lisa has detailed). It seems reasonable to me that even if we were all writing our pages in English, we have select vocabulary and grammar that we each prefer and gravitate towards. This would of course suggest that the VMS text is not copied from previous manuscripts but has original content, each created by each scribe.
RE: Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B - npcompl33t - 24-09-2026
(24-09-2026, 10:00 AM)nablator wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You mean ydy? yty?
sorry i meant *initial* bench, like all of the other words in that list. I am also not attempting to explain ALL 'ed' with these rules, i am only attempting to explain -edy. I'm not saying that such rules do not exist, just that I have not yet found them.
The two rules I've identified show that these are not cases of simple blanket substitutions, they involve complex slot grammar with multiple possibilities based on context within the word.
However, I think these two rules provide a robust starting point to expand the search.
(24-09-2026, 10:00 AM)nablator wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A possible solution is to append a word starting with a (al, ar, aiin) after some of the "ed" endings generated by the previous rule.
This is interesting, I'll definitely dig into this a bit more.
RE: Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B - npcompl33t - 24-09-2026
(24-09-2026, 12:10 PM)Skoove wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm not sure that an A to B map is possible since we see considerable evidence of 'transitionary' stages between the two (I know Rene has a good explanation of this on his site).
Perhaps this is not the right thread for this question but I did just wonder, has anyone seen if word frequency (i.e. the way we discovered and differentiate between A and B) correlates with the scribal hand (the 5 scribes that Lisa has detailed). It seems reasonable to me that even if we were all writing our pages in English, we have select vocabulary and grammar that we each prefer and gravitate towards. This would of course suggest that the VMS text is not copied from previous manuscripts but has original content, each created by each scribe.
I've read his work, and address some of it in my other thread. I limited my search to early Herbal A vs B because both of us agree that these represent stable bases. IF there is evidence of 'transitory' stages, then that is exactly what you would need to be able to derive these rules, and by definition a map would be possible.
RE: Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B - npcompl33t - 24-09-2026
(24-09-2026, 04:58 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That would be a very valuable result! Meanwhile, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is what could be a first step in that direction: a set of "projection rules" that seem to map both A and B to the same language (but with massive loss of information).
I actually linked to your idea in my OP, I think the rules i mentioned are a decent first step at identifying a portion of the larger set of projection rules.
(24-09-2026, 04:58 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If this hunch is true, then the differences between Herbal A and B may be due to a "spelling reform" that the Author did between transcribing the two books; or to differences between the dialect or pronunciation of the two ur-books; or to differences in the style and format of the entries.
I am starting to suspect something similar. Do you have a theory on the order the sections would have been written in?
This is going into pure speculation, I don't have proof of this and might revise this later on learning more, but I think specifically the chy-> edy/chdy rule represents something like this.
If there is say an 'archaic' and 'modern' voynich, the transition from using chy to edy / chdy would make sense.
Herbal B scribes seem to mostly prefer -edy, however, there seem to be some 'archaic' rules that still necessitate the 'ch' in certain situations, particularly with the P / F gallows. Late Herbal A / Pharma would seem to have been written after Early Herbal A, because the -chy usage there is roughly equivalent to Herbal B.
The 'd insertion' before y could reflect grammar or tense, but it would make sense if that was a later convention that didn't exist when early herbal A was written, as it is a broad change, with B scribes preferring -chdy over -chy.
Again, pure speculation, but it makes sense with what i've seen so far.
RE: Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B - Jorge_Stolfi - 24-09-2026
(24-09-2026, 02:38 PM)npcompl33t wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am starting to suspect something similar. Do you have a theory on the order the sections would have been written in?
I am quite confident that Zodiac was written before Bio/Balneo, because the Scribe's was visibly learning to draw the nymphs when he started the former.
I also believe that Pharma is earlier than Herbal, because some details of the plants in the latter You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. (However, the Herbal version is often mangled, as if the Scribe did not understand the Pharma sketch. So maybe the Pharma sketches were made by the Author himself, or by a different Scribe.)
But I don't know about the order of Herbal A vs. Herbal B, or between any other pair of sections. Maybe all Pharma copies are in one of the two Herbals?
All the best, --stolfi
RE: Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B - dashstofsk - 25-09-2026
(24-09-2026, 03:20 AM)npcompl33t wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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.
You have an interesting idea.
Your lists of words are almost all gallow words, and the strings that you consider to be of significance, chy, edy, chdy are suffices to the gallow words ( i.e. the segments that comes after the gallow character ).
Perhaps a better way to explore the phenomenon would be to list by frequency the suffices of all gallow words from languages A and B and to compare the frequencies. I have done this.
You will notice that edy, eedy, ain, ar, chedy, chdy are all significantly more frequent in language B than in A.
ol, chy, or, eol, chol, chor, eor are all more frequent in language A.
I think it will take more than a few 'transformation rules' to explain the differences between A and B.
Perhaps you might also care to read a previous post of mine [ You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ] where I tried to show that the majority of gallow words could be constructed from lists of prefixes and suffices and that the choice of suffix is independent of the prefix.
RE: Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B - npcompl33t - 25-09-2026
(25-09-2026, 09:32 AM)dashstofsk wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Your lists of words are almost all gallow words, and the strings that you consider to be of significance, chy, edy, chdy are suffices to the gallow words ( i.e. the segments that comes after the gallow character ).
Virtually every voynich word can be decomposed into a suffix that follows a gallows character, and to allow suffixes to freely move like this permits you to change almost any voynich word into another word.
As much as possible, the suffix of the word needs to remain constant, because considering suffixes swappable will very quickly boil most voynich words down to just a handful.
The type of frequency analysis you are describing is indeed something I am doing, but it alone is not sufficient. For instance, aiin can basically be swapped out with any suffix and the frequencies match. This does not mean that qokedy and qokaiin are the same word. It means qok occurs at roughly the same frequency across the manuscript.
To establish a rule, words that appear mostly if not entirely in one section need to be mapped into words that are also rare or nonexistant, and all words that could be created by a rule need to be check to see if the accounting all lines up -- would that rule generate far more of a particular word than we actually see?
Several of the words you mentioned i would also not consider suffixes, even though they can appear in another word. It would be like calling 'our' a suffix in English because pour, four, tour, flour all exist.
'ire' would be another englsh word: tire, fire, sire, quire, etc.
If you were to guess that ire and our are suffixes, four and fire are the same word, because f + ire or f +our.
So word endings does not automatically = suffix, even if many words seem to share it. They are not freely changeable with different forms, like how 'hike' can take both -ing, -ed, or -er to be hiking, hiker, hiked.
Part of the challenger here is differentiating between the two, and i think frequency analysis is definitley a part of it, but shared frequency alone is not sufficient, in particular because quickly you will find that to make everything work out some endings, like -edy, need to function as a type of abbreviation, with multiple different words mapping into them. So you have to do the accounting of transforming all the words using all the rules, adding up all the generated words, and making sure everything still lines up even if mutiple rules would turn different words into a single word.