[ey] and [dy] Feature Patterns

[Emma May Smith]

One of the questions from my talk on Voynich Manuscript Day was about the differences between words ending [ey] and [dy], and the word immediately following them. I thought I would provide some more statistics and thoughts around this, and also ask for the opinions of others. (There were other questions too from my talk, but I'm so sorry, I didn't have chance to record them. I'm happy to look into anything people want me to follow up.)

All the scores below are for a given feature (glyph or biglyph) occurring in the word immediately following a word ending [ey] or [edy]. They are expressed as z-scores, but I'll set the "interesting" threshold to +/- 2, which has a 95% probability. So most are likely to be valid/worth considering seriously. The data is all Language B, with feature 1 needing to occur at least 100 hundred times in the text, and feature 2 needing to occur at least 200 times in the distribution +/- 8 around feature 1. (These are the same for the data I presented.)

(I've changed [dy] to [edy] to more clearly identify [dy] as a potential suffix. I believe (though it's not important to these patterns) that [ey] + [dy] = [edy]. Hence we're actually looking at the difference caused by the addition of this suffix. Of course, what "suffix" even means here is anybody's guess.)

The scores all show an instance where one pattern is at > +/- 2 and the other is different in some way. I'll try to provide some thoughts, but would welcome others.

End--Start


('ey.', '.d') 0.4
('ey.', '.da') 1.6

('edy.', '.d') -2.9
('edy.', '.da') -2.3

Words ending [edy] are less likely to be following by words starting [d]. Note that if [a] = [y] then part of this might be avoiding [dy.dy] across a space. (Though see below about words ending [dy].)


('ey.', '.k') 2.6
('ey.', '.ka') 3.2
('ey.', '.ke') 0.7
('ey.', '.te') 2.9

('edy.', '.k') -2.6
('edy.', '.ka') -2.8
('edy.', '.ke') -2.4
('edy.', '.te') 0.3

The contrast before words beginning [k] was mentioned in the talk. It's interesting that [te] has the same kind of bias, but not so extreme.

('ey.', '.l') 3.3
('ey.', '.lk') 3.2
('ey.', '.lo') 2.3
('ey.', '.lsh') 2.5

('edy.', '.l') 1.9
('edy.', '.lk') 0.9
('edy.', '.lo') 0.0
('edy.', '.lsh') 0.8

Words beginning [l] are more common after [ey], though after [edy] they're not less common than average, just not so strongly positive.

('ey.', '.ot') -2.1
('edy.', '.ot') 1.4

The pattern is reversed before words beginning [ot]. (Though other words beginning [o] show no difference, so maybe this is just noise?)

('ey.', '.r') 3.0
('ey.', '.ra') 3.2

('edy.', '.r') 1.4
('edy.', '.ra') 0.4

Much stronger preference for [ey] before [r] than for [edy]. But not sure what to make of this.

End--End

('ey.', 'edy.') -2.1
('ey.', 'ey.') 2.2

('edy.', 'edy.') 2.1
('edy.', 'ey.') 0.0

We can see the contrast between [ey] and [edy] before others words ending [edy]. It may be that words ending [edy] cluster, but I'm not sure that would account for after [ey]. Likewise, there's a similar (but less strong) contrast for words ending [ey].

('ey.', 'in.') 2.8
('ey.', 'ain.') 2.5
('ey.', 'iin.') 2.3

('edy.', 'in.') -0.7
('edy.', 'ain.') 0.5
('edy.', 'iin.') -1.1

All kinds of words ending with combination of [i] and [n] prefer after [ey] than [edy].

('ey.', 'o.') -0.2
('edy.', 'o.') -2.3

A smaller contrast with words ending [o].


Thoughts?