[Blog Post] A Universal Template

[pfeaster]

There is probably a thread about this, but how do we define an 'invalid' voynichese word ?

In the present context (and how I meant it) it is just a word that does not occur in the Voynich MS as we have it.

A corollary is that any hapax legomenon would be an invalid word if the page it appears on happened to be missing.  It might make more sense to refer to "unattested" words, but the term "invalid word" (in the sense Rene meant) seems to be pretty well entrenched by now.

I suppose it could be useful to consider a further category of words that don't occur in the VM as we have it, but that at least conform to the same patterns as other words that do occur in it.  For example, I'd suggest that [qokeeokeedy] follows reasonably well-attested patterns (in spite of the double gallows), whereas [iinqeeadk] doesn't.  But unless I'm missing something, it looks like [qokeeokeedy] and [iinqeeadk] would both fit the proposed Universal Template equally well.

On the other hand, I could imagine the Universal Template -- with its twelve columns -- forming a nice basis for mapping Voynichese text to musical notes in a chromatic scale.