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• RE: Multi-word labels

  MarcoP > 11-09-2019, 07:51 AM

  (10-09-2019, 09:09 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To check the position of the most common word was a great idea, Marco. It makes me wonder whether this would be reversed in a Germanic text. In theory it should, since all those common adjectives like sizes and colors would go before the noun.

  
  
  Though I am totally ignorant of German, I think you are right. Browsing through You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of Fuchs' printed herbal, one can see that two-word titles appear to cluster together, exactly because they share the same initial word (klein, gross, rot, wilder...). These titles also occur as labels for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the book.
     
  
  
  Also in Auslasser's manuscript herbal, the first word sometimes is a common adjective:
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  But there are cases where the ending -kraut -wurtz is written as a separate word, producing labels where the first position is occupied by what should be the most specific, less common word.
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  With a good deal of wishful thinking, one could say that, in early-modern herbal two-word labels, the position of the most common word correlates with noun-adjective languages (like Latin and related languages) vs adjective-noun languages (like German and English). With even more wishful thinking, one could speculate that the VMS appears to belong to the second category: but this really is a wild guess, since only a minority of Voynich labels are related with plants. More work is clearly needed.
  
  Anyway, two-word labels are likely to be noun phrases. If Voynichese is written phonetically, or if it is a cipher where each word corresponds to a single source word, these labels could tell us something about the structure of the underlying language.
  
  

  (10-09-2019, 09:09 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The lack of extremely common words as the middle word of three-word labels is something I find hard to explain from the reference point of the European languages I know, though it might not be unusual in other languages?

  
  Three-word labels are both more complex (since they obviously offer more possibilities) and rarer: analysis is even more difficult than for two-word labels. From what I have seen, in three-word labels, extremely common words are rare both in the VMS and in Egerton 747. The most common word that occurs in the middle word is "vel": it only occurs twice and it ranks 54th in the frequencies of my small Latin corpus.
  
  In the VMS there seems to be an occurrence of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the most common word) in the middle of a three-word label.
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