A case for Gibberish

[Mark Knowles]

There are numerous medieval plant books in which every single plant is identified as being wet or dry, hot or cold, and sometimes the degree to which this is true is also included. In others, the wet/dry/hot/cold descriptions are not mentioned for every plant, they are applied sporadically. wet/dry/hot/cold were sometimes applied to other things besides plants (one sometimes sees it in cosmology books, as well).

It seems a stretch for a number of very different and disparate things to be meaningfully and usefully described as "wet", "dry", "hot" and "cold".

However again the coup de grâce for me is: why are the spellings of "wet", "dry", "hot" and "cold" so similar? (otol, okol, okal, otor etc.)