geoffreycaveney's Middle English theory

[geoffreycaveney]

I remember a post, but I have been unable to find it again, in which the top ten most frequent words in a Middle English text were listed. At least some of these words should appear with some higher frequency in any solution that suggests that this is the language of the source text.

This has not been achieved.

There are many perfectly logical and plausible reasons why the Voynich MS text (or more precisely the Language A sections) may be written in Middle English in a very strange cipher, and yet the most frequent words in the Voynich MS text may still not correspond very closely with the most frequent words in a more typical Middle English text. Here are just a small number of the many possible reasons for such a discrepancy:

1. The cipher text omits the English articles "a, an, the", etc., entirely.

2. The small function words, which are the most frequent words, are particularly susceptible to an added level of homonymy due to the particular unusual cipher rules of the "Yorkist cipher" that I propose was employed. This will scramble the very concept of "word frequency". At the very least, it would be necessary to recalculate all of the standard word frequency lists for standard Middle English texts, applying the "Yorkist cipher" rules to all of the words in them, and see how those frequency lists compare with the Voynich MS text word frequency statistics.

3. In the lines of text at the bottom of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (all of the last 7 lines now) that I have interpreted so far, the style and structure of the text appears to be that of a series of one-line epigram type statements. The content of each line is related to the lines that precede and follow it, but for the most part each line is a distinct grammatical entity. At most the grammatical connections may extend to two lines of consecutive text. Naturally such observations are provisional after just 7 lines of text. But that is the pattern that is emerging, and indeed it is consistent with what we know of the Voynich MS text and its well-known "line-based structural features".

A series of hundreds or thousands of one-line epigram style statements is not necessarily going to have word frequency statistics that are similar to more standard types of texts in the same language. It is easier to avoid the extremely frequent use of common function words in a stylized one-line epigram. If one writes each such epigram separately, hundreds or thousands of times, certain words that even Chaucer or Wycliffe cannot avoid using very frequently can possibly be used with much less frequency. 

Regarding the comparison of my work to Leonell Strong's claimed Middle English interpretation, I can document each word form and affix I use by reference to the University of Michigan's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I highly doubt that Strong's Middle English plaintext achieved such a high standard. 

Geoffrey