alternating patterns

[MarcoP]

Thanks, Marco, again some interesting data. 

I find it hard to consider this without thinking about the apparent lack of function words at the same time, or at least their low absolute numbers. It seems like the examples you found from European languages always contain a mixture of lexical and non-lexical words. But can we say that something like that exists in Voynichese if we can't find decent candidates for words like "and, or, if, in, not...."?

Perhaps we might try to find samples of other languages and see if the absolute frequencies of the words in their repeating patterns are more like those found in Voynichese? Just brainstorming a bit.

Thank you, Koen!
Hunting for function words is difficult. If one considers short and frequent words as candidates (I know this is simplistic) "daiin" doesn't look like a poor candidate for "and". In the VMS it occurs about 850 times. In the Mattioli and Pliny samples of comparable length I considered, "et" occurs 1202 and 1150 times respectively. I don't think the difference is enough to conclude that "daiin" cannot be a conjunction; on the contrary, it could be seen as consistent with this well-known hypothesis.

There are computational methods that could identify words that behave similarly on the basis of adjacent words (e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). But my impression is that, to be reliable, these require a much larger corpus than the VMS. I am thinking of trying a mix of computational and "manual" analyses, but the first step could be identifying simple patterns like those described here and see if there is anything we can infer from these structures.

Of course, there is the possibility that in Voynichese function words are replaced by affixes. We know that some Latin scribes systematically "merged" a particle (conjunction or preposition) with the following word, so this could be a feature of the language or of the script. The evidence that Emma May Smith discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. suggests that the most obvious candidate q- doesn't behave as a grammatical prefix would, but also in this area much work can still be done.