What are labels?

[Anton]

Some stars have no labels, therefore it is not necessary for every star to have a meaningful label

Exactly, but it is as well not necessary for every star to have a meaningless label. However, the scribe took effort to label all stars in f68r1, while he left many stars unlabeled in f68r2.

The reason for having meaningless labels is to confuse the person trying to break the cipher

With labels, it's a way to confuse one's own self. It's not to be forgotten that writing and enciphering is one part. The other part is deciphering and reading. There must be a mechanism then for the reader to distinguish a meaningful label from a meaningless one.


No, while (as I said) I'm not familiar with what grounds you build your null-words theory upon, the Voynich stars diagrams do not seem to me to support it out of the box.

I view rare and distinctly spelled words as being much more likely to be "real" words than very common words with spellings very similar to other very common words

Why?

Note the repeated labels tend to be spelled very similarly to each other, whereas the "unique" labels tend to be spelled much more differently from one another; this should be statistically verifiable, which is on my list to do.

For the Voynich stars, the obvious similarity for the frequent ones is that they mostly begin with "o". Seven out of nine most frequent Voynich stars begin with "o". Here's the list:

• otol (20,3% of all occurrences)
  
• odaiin (14,7%)
  
• otor (10,9%)
  
• olor (7,2%)
  
• dchol (5,8%)
  
• okeor (5,3%)
  
• okchor (4,6%)
  
• chodar (3,4%)
  
• ockhy (3,1%)
  

There's also morphological similarity between some of them, e.g. otol vs otor vs olor.

However, that holds not only for frequent stars. 72% of all star names begin with "o". There is also morphological similarity for certain rare or unique stars, such as otydy vs otys, okodaly vs okoaly, otcheody vs okcheody vs ofcheody.

The fact that 72% of all stars begin with "o", does not very well agree with the idea of noun denominations. Supposing graphical stars represent a homogenous set of notions, 72% of names of those notions would not begin with a single letter, unless most of those are null-labels and "o" is a special marker of a null-vord. Furthermore, there are only six starting letters for the Voynich star names on the whole.

The simplest "best-odds" explanation would be an article, something like Arabic "al", which immediately moves out of the realm of simple nouns.

Otol is made up only of glyphs in the listing on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

No, there's no "t" on that list.