Classical astrology in the text of the Voynich zodiac?

[-JKP-]

Now this is getting interesting. One thing I don't understand though. What exactly would be the difference with natural language? 

Take a productive prefix like "re-". That's a concept in its own right. I can invent a verb and add the concept "re" to it. Revoynich: to make something look like the voynich AGAIN. 

Or to take an example thst would occur a lot: Latin -que. Or case endings, they stand for multiple concepts: gender, number, function.

Even in a word like football, each syllable stands for a concept.

I'm not trying to argue with your proposed soluton. Just wonder how this would differ from what one could find in natural language, especially stuff like prefixes and case endings.

In natural language we make up names for things like Sagittarius.

If, however, you are describing Sagittarius in a conceptual way, you might name it Voynich-style with something like ani (for animal) + sht (for shoot, as in shooting an arrow). Notice how the words animal and shoot are general terms that could be applied to a lot of things besides Sagittarius, in fact, in English "shoot" might also stand for a new bud coming up from a flower seed, in which case you might invent a word like hot-shoot (a peppery plant where you use the shoot as the medicinal part).

This is not an unprecedented way of thinking. Old Hebrew and many Asian languages, as I've mentioned a few times, use concept-modifier, concept-modifier. In old Hebrew the vowels do the modifying. Thus, in an abjad system, the same root-word can serve for both "book" and "writer".

In Asian languages, a radical or attached symbol is often used as the modifier. Chinese uses radicals quite extensively. The Boa language (now essentially extinct) has many of the root + modifier characteristics. You tend to find this structure in the older languages. The world is now a melting pot with most languages being infused with loan-words that don't follow the traditional structure (Korean as a particular example is dramatically altered with imported computer terms that follow English sounds rather the Korean traditional grammatical structure).


If you have syllables representing concepts, you can create something that is hot-dry, hot-wet, etc., and maybe further modify it (e.g., fem. or masc.) INSTEAD of labeling it Sagittarius, you describe its attributes or its relationship to other things (doesn't necessarily have to be attributes).


Look at the plant names in the small-plants section. Look at the amount of repetition in those labels (particularly in the roots section). Now PEEL APART those syllables, stop looking at them as individual letters... see how concept-modifier has been applied. Note how many have the same first syllable and then.... well what do you know... a modifier specific to that plant.

This is why I've been shaking my head for a long time at the basic assumption by a very large number of people, including some with advanced degrees, that the labels are nouns in a substitution code. They are not STRUCTURED like nouns in a substitution code.