11-02-2017, 01:33 PM
Hi Thomas, Koen gives a pretty fair summary of my thoughts. Basically, a the beginning of a line, the character [s] is added on to words beginning [a] and some words beginning [o]; the characters [y] and [d] are added on to many words beginning [ch, sh]. These characters are additional and should be removed to find the underlying word.
I think the cause may be a process known as sandhi, where the sounds of neighbouring words (or syllables) influence one another. It's a very common process and may have been quite normal in Voynichese. But the line break, for some reason, made the scribe spell it out. It could have been simple wariness on the part of the scribe that the reader might not remember the word at the end of the line before, or it could be that the scribe considered the line break itself somehow linguistic—that is, an actual break in the text, or pausa.
There are other line patterns in the text where the statistics for certain words change depending on their position in the line. Another one, similar the one you point out, is that word initial [k] is less common than word initial [t], even excluding Grove Words. Voynichese.com gives 216 occurrences of word initial [t] in such a position, but only 27 of word initial [k]. This may turn out to be an important part of the puzzle.
I think the cause may be a process known as sandhi, where the sounds of neighbouring words (or syllables) influence one another. It's a very common process and may have been quite normal in Voynichese. But the line break, for some reason, made the scribe spell it out. It could have been simple wariness on the part of the scribe that the reader might not remember the word at the end of the line before, or it could be that the scribe considered the line break itself somehow linguistic—that is, an actual break in the text, or pausa.
There are other line patterns in the text where the statistics for certain words change depending on their position in the line. Another one, similar the one you point out, is that word initial [k] is less common than word initial [t], even excluding Grove Words. Voynichese.com gives 216 occurrences of word initial [t] in such a position, but only 27 of word initial [k]. This may turn out to be an important part of the puzzle.