What are the characteristics of Labelese?

[MarcoP]

You're right Marco. For multi-word labels this would be no problem (perhaps even expected, because adjectives like "large" appear in many contexts). But since they appear as single labels, they do point to an underlying problem.


Either the labels don't really (or don't always) name the thing they're with. Or else, this is a consequence of the way Voynichese encodes its language, perhaps creating an abnormal amount of homographs.

I used to think that the presence of many homographs might explain some of the weirdness of Voynichese, but now I am not so sure.

Single-word labels with apparently different meanings are quite frequent, something like 10% of the whole set. I believe that such a rate of homographs is unlikely in general: most sentences would he hopelessly ambiguous. Moreover, if 10% of the times a single word-type is used to express two or more different concepts, TTR would be significantly reduced, which does not seem to be the case.
Your TTR research points out that Voynichese behaves like an inflected language: it has more types per N tokens than little-inflected languages like English or Italian. Also in comparison with an inflected language like Greek, Voynichese tends to have a higher TTR.


This leaves the other option you mentioned:
the labels don't really (or don't always) name the thing they're with
In this case, the most obvious difficulty for me is that labels in other manuscripts work as expected: there is not a great overlap (if any) among single-word labels in herbals and bestiaries, and the labels mostly are plant and animal names respectively. Once again, finding parallels could suggest explanations that are somehow plausible, rather than merely possible.