Floating gallows

[pfeaster]

Because of the random choice of space insertion in transliterations, most statistics on words are unreliable.

This observation might account for one pattern I've just been trying to look into over the past couple days -- one that might also be referred to as "floating gallows," but in another sense.

Taking the hypothesis that gallows aren't an inherent part of words, but are only added to words, I tried comparing the statistics for all words containing [k] and [t] against the statistics for the same words without them (in paragraphic text only, leaving out labels, etc.).

Sometimes a reasonably common word with [k] or [t] doesn't have an attested counterpart without the gallows.  For example, there are no tokens of [qoey], [qochdy], [ool], [oey], [yeey], or [chchey].  That could be a problem for the hypothesis.

On the other hand, there are sometimes also curiously complete sets of words in which a gallows can be found inserted at every point in a relatively common gallows-less word -- almost.

Take [cheey], which has 133 tokens in its gallows-less form.  If we limit ourselves to discrete words, we have:

[kcheey] 3 and [tcheey] 6
[cKheey] 10 and [cTheey] 13
[chkeey] 13 and [chteey] 1
[chekey] 5 and [chetey] 4
[cheeky] 21 and [cheety] 3
*[cheeyk] 0 and *[cheeyt] 0

The only place in [cheey] where we never find a gallows inserted to form a discrete word is at the very end.

But we do find the hapax legomena [cheeykam] and [cheeytal] -- which is what we might expect if the insertion of a gallows had filled in a space in [cheey.am] and [cheey.al].  We also find:

[cheey.k*] 6 and [cheey.t*] 4
[cheey,k*] 4 and [cheey,t*] 1

-- in which a following gallows has been attached in transcription to the next word, with fully half (5/10) of such cases being flagged as ambiguous (with comma breaks).  Maybe these latter cases look like nablator's examples.

All of which could be taken to suggest that these various words [kcheey], [cKheey], [chkeey], and so forth might be better analyzed as a consistent [cheey] with a gallows inserted at different points (or "floating" from place to place?) than in terms of a word morphology built around [k] or [t] occupying a consistent "core"-type slot.

If that were so, then perhaps a gallows could legitimately be placed midway between two words just as well as anywhere else -- although that could risk undermining the very definition of the Voynichese "word."