labels as words

[MarcoP]

In her discussion of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Emma wrote:

The theory explains labelese—the different word statistics associated with label words—by putting such words effectively outside the transformation the text undergoes. If transformation works by altering words according to their environment then labels, which have no environment because they are usually isolated, should not be transformed. Labels are then the normal text. Of course, some labelese words are found in the main text, but there is no reason why every word in the transformed text must be altered, if the environment does not cause it.

Under the assumption that Voynichese is linguistic and phonetic, labels could be different from the main body of text in several ways, for instance:

• Words in the text might be phonetically altered on the basis of the adjacent words. Labels have no adjacent words, so they are likely unaltered (as Emma suggests)
  
• Labels might typically share several syntactic features. For instance, they might mostly be nouns in their singular form (and “nominative case”?)
  
• Most of the Voynich labels apply to similar objects: nymphs and “small” plants. The limited range of the illustrated objects could correspond to a limited semantic range of the corresponding labels.
  

While I currently have no precise idea of how to analyze the differences between labels and the main text, I have collected a couple of simple diagrams that highlight some of the superficial differences of the labels.

This histogram compares the 25 most common prefixes for all the words in the ms with the corresponding percentages for the words that appear in labels (I have included multi-word labels, counting each word individually). I have simply considered the last two EVA characters, which of course causes some distortion (such as the high numbers for ch-,sh- which typically behave like digraphs).
   

The main differences are that:

• qo-, sh-, ch- are less frequent in labels
  
• the o- prefix is more frequent in labels
  
• the y- prefix is more frequent in labels (but much less clearly so than o-)
  

This is the corresponding histogram for the 25 most common suffixes.
   

• -ey,-in are less frequent in labels
  
• -ry, -ly, -sy are much more frequent in labels
  

This diagram highlights something that has also been discussed by Emma: -y suffixes cannot be lumped all together.