I believe this is a side of the question we have not yet considered in this thread: which words appear immediately before and after bench-words. As a first experiment, I have looked at the most common couple chedy/shedy. I hope these results are reasonably accurate, but double-checking would be appreciated.
I have only considered pages in which at least one of the two words appears. For each of the most frequent words in these pages, I have counted the number of occurrences of:
Once again, the two words appear to behave quite similarly. The greatest difference could be that 'daiin' follows chedy but never follows shedy. Another difference is that shedy.chedy is considerably more frequent than chedy.shedy (8 vs 3 occurrences); but we already discussed how chedy tends to appear nearer the end of the line than shedy. Third, here it seems that shedy is more often followed by -edy words: this could be something worth testing for more general cases.
For comparison, I have also looked at the behaviour of qokeedy, which occurs 305 times in this pages (1.2% frequency). In this case, the differences are quite large, look for instance at the combination with ol, daiin, qokain, chey, or. In general, one can observe that (in this set of data) qokeedy never follows -in, while chedy/shedy often do. Given the Voynichese tendency to quasi-reduplication, it seems also interesting that chey never appears before chedy/shedy (while it is frequent before qokeedy).
If Voynichese words are meaningful, it seems that chedy and shedy must have a closely related meaning/function, while qokeedy appears to be quite different. On the other hand, the differences can be largely explained by the general dislike of q-words to follow -in and the opposite preference of bench-words to do so.
I have only considered pages in which at least one of the two words appears. For each of the most frequent words in these pages, I have counted the number of occurrences of:
- W.chedy
- chedy.W
- W.shedy
- shedy.W
Once again, the two words appear to behave quite similarly. The greatest difference could be that 'daiin' follows chedy but never follows shedy. Another difference is that shedy.chedy is considerably more frequent than chedy.shedy (8 vs 3 occurrences); but we already discussed how chedy tends to appear nearer the end of the line than shedy. Third, here it seems that shedy is more often followed by -edy words: this could be something worth testing for more general cases.
For comparison, I have also looked at the behaviour of qokeedy, which occurs 305 times in this pages (1.2% frequency). In this case, the differences are quite large, look for instance at the combination with ol, daiin, qokain, chey, or. In general, one can observe that (in this set of data) qokeedy never follows -in, while chedy/shedy often do. Given the Voynichese tendency to quasi-reduplication, it seems also interesting that chey never appears before chedy/shedy (while it is frequent before qokeedy).
If Voynichese words are meaningful, it seems that chedy and shedy must have a closely related meaning/function, while qokeedy appears to be quite different. On the other hand, the differences can be largely explained by the general dislike of q-words to follow -in and the opposite preference of bench-words to do so.
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