frequent Voynich vords in Slavic VCI and West Slavic languages

[RenegadeHealer]

Let me be blunt: I was breaking my own rules of my own system to give you the quick speculative guess of the "without you" meaning for <béz bas>. I hope my system as a whole is not judged by this one possible little mistake of mine. I will try to be more careful.

I can only speak for myself, but I'm not one to judge you for that. The worst that'll happen is your model is wrong, and being wrong and trying to understand why you were wrong is one of the best teachers. Trust me, I'm not trying to break your chops, and I apologize if I came across that way. I'm just trying to be helpful. It's always a heartbreaking to see a researcher waste large amounts of time and energy on a theory because they ignored early signs they were on the wrong track.

That would be an excellent research project for me to investigate. But keep in mind that there are many different types of medieval texts, and some may match more closely with the Voynich ms text, while others may not. The classic examples of written Czech in the time period of the Voynich ms would be the works of Jan Hus. But Hus was not writing herbals or pharmacological manuals or recipe collections or astrological / cosmological works or stories about bathing naked women. Still, the comparison of word frequency ranks could be of general interest and relevance.

You have a good point about specimen selection, Geoffrey. I've noticed recently a number of statistical analyses of the VMs, both new and classic, have come under attack for questionable selection of comparison texts / control specimens, which is fair criticism. The problem is that without any certainty about the VMs's subject matter, it's very hard to know what natural language text, in what language and what genre of literature, would provide a reasonable apples-to-apples comparison for textual analysis. Good luck sourcing one; this is your project, but if it were mine, this would probably be my next step.