19-03-2019, 02:07 PM
Let's put the paradigm in action and try to produce an illustration.
I have some paragraph stats gathered from the time when I was searching for PPNs, and thus I was able to quite quickly produce the following statistics. At present it is only for folios up to f46v, but it will be easily expanded to the rest of the botanical section, and I am also planning to extend it to the whole corpus, although the latter will require considerably more effort.
I examine all paragraph-initial vords. The idea is that we don't have any obvious sentence start markers, except that for starts of paragraphs. So each paragraph start is a sentence start.
In the folio range above specified, I count 185 paragraphs (I leave off two paragraphs with weirdos in f1r, since we don't know if those weirdos are part of Voynihese or not). 168 of those, or 90,8%, do begin with vords which begin with gallows. Let's call such vords "Gvords". Benched gallows are also included in this total count (let's call that "bGvords", and they are subset of Gvords), but their share is negligible - only five bGvords.
So Gvords are very, very popular to start a sentence, for whatever reason.
Next we check if paragraph-initial vords exhibit high degree of uniqueness. It turns out that (in the said folio range) 51,9% of all paragraph-initial vords are unique. We must be careful about possible inflexions, which may make these vords "not-that-unique", but generally this looks like what is a high figure. It would be less common, I think, to use unique verbs or unique words of other parts of speech for beginning of your sentence, so it is reasonable to suppose that paragraph-initial vords are, in their majority, nouns. Since they are mostly Gvords, then that makes gallows a noun-marker, be that explicit (like an article) or implicit (like a reference to a particular nomenclator), does not matter.
Now we move on to labels, the discussion of which in this thread stimulated this idea. We discussed that labels - at least some of them - do not look like plain designators. Instead they look like referrers. But very many labels start with "o", then immediately followed by gallows. Considering that a Gvord is a noun and the label is a referrer, this makes the "o" prefix a referral operator, something like "to", "related to" or "for", "intended for", "appropriate for". With this approach, the notorious "otol" is no more "otol", but instead it is "o tol" - that is, "related to tol". Notice that I don't touch the question of whether "o" is "to" or "for" in English, or "zu" or "fur" in German, I simply suggest a relational operator.
Next, there is an observation that quite often when we have the "o-Gvord", we also have the "qo-Gvord". And, in contrast to "o", "qo" is very rare to start labels with. I remember reading that "q-" signified negation somewhere in Middle Ages or that "q" is supposed to signify negation in the VMS. If we take this as working assumption, then "qo" would mean something opposite to "o". I suggest that if "o" is "to", "towards" or "for", then "qo" would be "from", "of" or "out of". Continuing the example, if "otol" is "for the tol", then "qotol" would be "from the tol". For example frequency counts, "tol" occurs 48 times in the whole corpus), "otol" - 86 times and "qotol" - 47 times. I think it makes sense to compare counts of Gvords to counts of respective o-Gvords and qo-Gvords, and to see if there is correlation. If the idea is correct, then there should be correlation, since if something is important in the context of narration (i.e. frequent), then it being an operand would also be important (frequent).
This interpretation of "qo" suits well the existence of quasi-reduplications such as "qo-this, qo-that, qo-whatever...". For example, a valid case is "this stuff cures from A, from B, from C, from D". Another possibility, - as discussed in the "function words" thread, - is "qo" as conjunction, but I like this option less, because it does not make sense in labels where "qo" does occur, however rare. Neither of the two options, however, explains away exact reduplications such as "qokeedy qokeedy", and one is left to write that away to scribal errors.
The "operator" approach easily suits the predominance of "qo" in Currier B, since it may be simply a matter of narrative that one needs "from" (or any other operator that "qo" stands for) much more often than in other thematical portions of the manuscript.
Next we move to the "y" prefix, which, by the way, is also not infrequent in labels. Developing this logic of operators, I could suggest that it could mean, for example, "with", although this is more speculative and basically just an idea out of the box. Then "qy" (7 occurrences in the corpus) would be "without". If "y" stands for "with", then probably it is "y" that would express conjunction (and not "q" or "qo").
Some further directions include:
1) Given a Gvord and its frequency count, check o-Gvord, qo-Gvord and y-Gvord and their frequency count. Perform contextual analysis of Gvords vs prefixed Gvords.
2) Given a Gvord, check the "vord" - i.e. the token with the leading gallows stripped.
Some questions that need to be addressed:
1) the gallows coverage is still untouched
2) treating leading "o", "qo" and "y" as prefixes will reduce character entropy. There may be some other major factor though, which would outweigh that.
3) exact reduplication of "qo-stuff" remains unexplained
4) it's not clear what to do with vords having gallows in the middle or in the end, such as e.g. "okchop".
5) the roles of different gallows are still unexplained
I have some paragraph stats gathered from the time when I was searching for PPNs, and thus I was able to quite quickly produce the following statistics. At present it is only for folios up to f46v, but it will be easily expanded to the rest of the botanical section, and I am also planning to extend it to the whole corpus, although the latter will require considerably more effort.
I examine all paragraph-initial vords. The idea is that we don't have any obvious sentence start markers, except that for starts of paragraphs. So each paragraph start is a sentence start.
In the folio range above specified, I count 185 paragraphs (I leave off two paragraphs with weirdos in f1r, since we don't know if those weirdos are part of Voynihese or not). 168 of those, or 90,8%, do begin with vords which begin with gallows. Let's call such vords "Gvords". Benched gallows are also included in this total count (let's call that "bGvords", and they are subset of Gvords), but their share is negligible - only five bGvords.
So Gvords are very, very popular to start a sentence, for whatever reason.
Next we check if paragraph-initial vords exhibit high degree of uniqueness. It turns out that (in the said folio range) 51,9% of all paragraph-initial vords are unique. We must be careful about possible inflexions, which may make these vords "not-that-unique", but generally this looks like what is a high figure. It would be less common, I think, to use unique verbs or unique words of other parts of speech for beginning of your sentence, so it is reasonable to suppose that paragraph-initial vords are, in their majority, nouns. Since they are mostly Gvords, then that makes gallows a noun-marker, be that explicit (like an article) or implicit (like a reference to a particular nomenclator), does not matter.
Now we move on to labels, the discussion of which in this thread stimulated this idea. We discussed that labels - at least some of them - do not look like plain designators. Instead they look like referrers. But very many labels start with "o", then immediately followed by gallows. Considering that a Gvord is a noun and the label is a referrer, this makes the "o" prefix a referral operator, something like "to", "related to" or "for", "intended for", "appropriate for". With this approach, the notorious "otol" is no more "otol", but instead it is "o tol" - that is, "related to tol". Notice that I don't touch the question of whether "o" is "to" or "for" in English, or "zu" or "fur" in German, I simply suggest a relational operator.
Next, there is an observation that quite often when we have the "o-Gvord", we also have the "qo-Gvord". And, in contrast to "o", "qo" is very rare to start labels with. I remember reading that "q-" signified negation somewhere in Middle Ages or that "q" is supposed to signify negation in the VMS. If we take this as working assumption, then "qo" would mean something opposite to "o". I suggest that if "o" is "to", "towards" or "for", then "qo" would be "from", "of" or "out of". Continuing the example, if "otol" is "for the tol", then "qotol" would be "from the tol". For example frequency counts, "tol" occurs 48 times in the whole corpus), "otol" - 86 times and "qotol" - 47 times. I think it makes sense to compare counts of Gvords to counts of respective o-Gvords and qo-Gvords, and to see if there is correlation. If the idea is correct, then there should be correlation, since if something is important in the context of narration (i.e. frequent), then it being an operand would also be important (frequent).
This interpretation of "qo" suits well the existence of quasi-reduplications such as "qo-this, qo-that, qo-whatever...". For example, a valid case is "this stuff cures from A, from B, from C, from D". Another possibility, - as discussed in the "function words" thread, - is "qo" as conjunction, but I like this option less, because it does not make sense in labels where "qo" does occur, however rare. Neither of the two options, however, explains away exact reduplications such as "qokeedy qokeedy", and one is left to write that away to scribal errors.
The "operator" approach easily suits the predominance of "qo" in Currier B, since it may be simply a matter of narrative that one needs "from" (or any other operator that "qo" stands for) much more often than in other thematical portions of the manuscript.
Next we move to the "y" prefix, which, by the way, is also not infrequent in labels. Developing this logic of operators, I could suggest that it could mean, for example, "with", although this is more speculative and basically just an idea out of the box. Then "qy" (7 occurrences in the corpus) would be "without". If "y" stands for "with", then probably it is "y" that would express conjunction (and not "q" or "qo").
Some further directions include:
1) Given a Gvord and its frequency count, check o-Gvord, qo-Gvord and y-Gvord and their frequency count. Perform contextual analysis of Gvords vs prefixed Gvords.
2) Given a Gvord, check the "vord" - i.e. the token with the leading gallows stripped.
Some questions that need to be addressed:
1) the gallows coverage is still untouched
2) treating leading "o", "qo" and "y" as prefixes will reduce character entropy. There may be some other major factor though, which would outweigh that.
3) exact reduplication of "qo-stuff" remains unexplained
4) it's not clear what to do with vords having gallows in the middle or in the end, such as e.g. "okchop".
5) the roles of different gallows are still unexplained