glyph [d] as a substitute for [p] and [f]

[geoffreycaveney]

However, I still believe [d] may be a substitute for [p] and [f]. I believe the explanation may lie in the author's use of alliteration and assonance. The sounds that these letters represent may simply tend to appear very frequently clustered together on the same lines, as an expression of this alliteration and assonance. In this case, [d] may be a substitute for [p] and [f], and still [d] may appear just as frequently or even perhaps more frequently on lines with [p] or [f] than on lines without [p] or [f].

There is no theory that cannot be saved by an additional ad hoc hypothesis. I see Voynich research as a battle against confirmation bias - my own - because it is very easy to get stuck in a cognitive trap. I have my own ideas on what the encryption may be and now that I have a good cipher that generates good-looking Voynichese without a dictionary I try to look for a refutation, not a confirmation, because I'd rather not spend years working on it if I can reject the idea in two weeks. This is why fallibility is a good thing to have for any theory.

A theory that makes no quantitative prediction that can be checked and can account for almost anything, including randomly generated pseudo-Voynichese necessarily has a very low probability. It may be worth investigating anyway, but one should be aware of the low value of success, as evidence, in this case. I don't remember how to calculate it with Bayes' formula and of course it is impossible to calculate anything when the test includes subjectivity, but you get the idea - I hope.

I get the idea and I understand your point. But a philological theory by its very nature tends to be qualitative, not quantitative. And yes, such a theory is very difficult to evaluate by standard simple quantitative tests and measures. Philology is very different from the hard data-based sciences. Scholars like Chomsky attempted for many decades to apply more strictly quantitative "rules-based" programmatic theories such as "generative grammar" to explain the construction of grammatical language in general, but I don't think they succeeded. Human language has historically defied all attempts at complete quantitative "rules-based" programmatic categorization and explanation.

In the case of this thread, I think the process has still been quite useful: I have been required to add an additional hypothesis about the nature of the text.

Regarding the "additional ad hoc hypothesis": I think it is plausible to suggest that the author composed the MS by making a series of ad hoc decisions. This is normal in the composition of written literary texts. So I think it is also plausible to suggest that we may need to make a series of ad hoc deductions in order to decipher the MS text and figure out how the author composed it.

Here is an example of the qualitative evidence I have in mind: the distinctly different functioning of [d] in a very frequent word such as in [chedy] vs. another very frequent word but in a very different form in [daiin]. Furthermore we have the very strange fact of the extreme frequency of [chedy] in Currier B vs. its total absence in Currier A. This suggests to me qualitatively that [d] may have a very different function in these two very frequent but distinctly different words. I believe this qualitative evidence suggests that in [chedy], the [d] is almost optional: the author chose to include it in the Currier B portions of the text, but the author chose to omit it in the Currier A portions of the text. It seems highly plausible to me to suggest that in this context, [d] may well represent a vowel before a final consonant in a grammatical suffix. It all looks very logical for example if [y] is "s": in Currier A the author did not bother to write the vowel before this "s", but in Currier B the author did include this vowel as [d].

In [daiin], however, [d] does not make so much sense as a vowel in this place in such a frequent word. Here it is much more plausible to treat [d] as a consonant.

This distinction between the apparent plausible functioning of [d] in [chedy], in particular its apparently "optional" nature in the word, vs. the apparent plausible functioning of [d] in [daiin], was in fact my original motivation for the hypothesis about the nature of [d] as sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant.

"u/v" is a very natural candidate for such a letter. This is language-neutral, but still very natural on a qualitative philological linguistic basis.

Then one considers more language-specific philological and phonological linguistic information, such as the alternation of "v" and "b" in many languages. All of this is qualitative, but that does not mean that it is worth less as evidence than purely quantitative measures.

Returning to [daiin], its frequency is much more plausible if [d] can sometimes represent a series of consonants, rather than if [d] is restricted to only represent "u/v".

I am not aware of any other entirely satisfactory explanation of [d] in these two frequent words: optional in penultimate position in [chedy], but prominent in initial position in [daiin]. If you or anyone else has a better or equally satisfactory explanation of [d] in these two words, I would love to hear it. But I want to evaluate it on qualitative plausible linguistic grounds, not merely on quantitative statistical text analysis.

Geoffrey