Unexpected languages

[-JKP-]

Hello VViews,
the most recent You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Stephen Bax also discusses Romani (or Romany).

In particular, paragraph 1. “Grammatical elements – a possible conjunction” is about  the possibility that daiin (the most frequent word in the Voynich manuscript) could be related with the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Romanj conjunction “taj” (meaning “and”).

As I wrote in a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on Stephen's site, there are two additional facts that I find interesting:

1) The Romany conjunction can be repeated (“taj taj”, possibly with the meaning “and also”). This is an analogy with EVA:daiin, that is often repeated (daiin daiin).

2) It has been noted that in the so-called Currier “language” B aiin is more frequent than daiin (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Maybe the loss of the initial d could be related to the Lovari variants“taj” and “aj”.

Of course Romanj is attractive. It is a family of languages with many Indo-Persian elements, that correspond to the theories of Stephen Bax and Derek Vogt. It had recently arrived in Central Europe at the time when the Voynich manuscript was written. 

Romani had no written tradition. This could justify the creation of a new alphabet largely based on signs used in medieval Latin manuscripts. Something analogous to the creation of the glagolitic alphabet (created in the IX century, on the basis of the Greek alphabet, to write the Slavic languages).

This comment is not addressed to you, specifically, Marco, but is a thought arising out of your post that relates more generally to the thread...

It seems to me to be intuitively obvious that the most frequent word in a mystery manuscript would be likened to common words like "and" "the" "is" "I" "what" or whatever else might be relevant to the subject matter so I'm assuming, without looking it up, that dozens of people, probably going back to Wilfrid Voynich himself, have proposed that daiin could be "and" (or "the" or "is", etc.).


What may be less obvious is this...

It might be important to consider why daiin is sometimes attached to other words and sometimes stands alone. I don't think it's an accident of the spacing. It appears to be deliberate. A good question to explore is, "Does it mean something different when it's attached or not?".


Think about it... if it DOES mean something different when attached or unattached, then is the token as common as it seems at first glance!?