previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms?

[geoffreycaveney]

For the convenience of anyone else who may be interested in following this line of investigation, I have worked through an Arabic letter frequency histogram chart (attached first in frequency order, right to left of course, and second grouped by letter shape) and made an effort to transcribe the Arabic letters into their Latin letter phonemic equivalents, which I present below in their frequency order along with their approximate percentage frequencies in a corpus of Arabic texts. It is notable how the letters for "l, n, m" are by far the most frequent consonants, which is a strikingly different frequency pattern from that which is typical of most European languages. It is also striking how low the frequencies of the letters for "t" and "s" are! Again very different from typical European frequency patterns. "b" is the most frequent obstruent, probably mainly due to the very common preposition "bi-" meaning 'with, in, at'. 

a/' 12.5%
l 12%
n 6.4%
m 6.3%
i/j 6.2%
u/w 5.8%
h 5%
b 4.5%
r 4.1%
` 3.9% (voiced pharyngeal "emphatic")
' 3% (glottal stop, first of several letters for it)
f 2.7%
q 2.6% (uvular "emphatic")
d 2.5%
t 2.5%
s 2.3%
k 1.9%
h. 1.8% (voiceless pharyngeal "emphatic")
-t 1%
-a 1%
dž/g 0.9%
s. 0.9% ("emphatic")
' 0.9% (another glottal stop)
dh 0.8% (like "th" in English 'the')
th 0.8%
x 0.8%
š 0.7%
z 0.5%
t. 0.5% ("emphatic")
d. 0.4% ("emphatic")
gh 0.3%
' 0.2% (glottal stop)
' 0.2% (glottal stop)
dh./z. 0.1% ("emphatic")
' 0.1% (glottal stop)
' 0.1% (glottal stop)

Geoffrey