Thoughts on [m, g] as [in, ain]? (Stolfi)

[tavie]

Yes, there does seem to be a disagreement or reasons to question the mapping.  Emma You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. final m might be replacing final r.

My own headcanon is that final m is an abbreviation for more than one final cluster, but that it's a less desirable abbreviation used predominantly near line end or image breaks because it has lower information content, and that radical transformation is going on elsewhere in the word ... if (and that's a big 'if') the assumption below holds.     

I've looked at it operating on the assumption that we should expect Line End words to reasonably resemble words elsewhere, i.e. in the midline.  There could be reasons against this, e.g. Line End words may disproportionately contain words that are found more at the end of sentences, which could distort the statistics.  Or if it's all meaningless.

But keeping that assumption, if final m is replacing final n, we could expect final n word types to be "missing" at Line End to a reasonably similar amount as the amount of extra final m word types.  The attached table shows expectations based on mid-line performance (with top row excluded due to its unusual behaviour).

   

In summary:

• For Scribe 3 in the Stars section, final m has the largest gap by far:  over 160 extra instances at Line End.  None of the "missing" finals reaches even half of that.  By numbers alone, this would suggest that final m word types are replacing at least three of the four common finals, if not all of them.  Incidentally, most of the missing final n word types are final kaiin or kain. 
  
• For Scribe 2 in the Balneological section, final m is again the only final with a large surplus at Line End.  Numbers wise, it's conceivable that it is replacing most of final n and final y word types.
  
• For Scribe 1 in Herbal A, we do see a difference in Line End behaviour.  Final m isn't the only one with a massive surplus:  we see final n actually beat it, mostly final daiin.  So it seems harder to argue that final m is replacing final n here.  (NB:  final y's score is deceptively low because it is torn between final dy having a surplus of over 50 and final ey being missing about a similar amount)
  

The problem, though, is that even if we "swap" the finals, there is often a mismatch between the missing word types and the surplus word types.  It's easier if the missing final is preceded by a.  That's what makes final aiin quite an appealing swap for final am.  But even for that kind of mapping, it's not that simple. Final kaiin/kain tend to be the driving force behind missing final n at Line End, but we don't see final kam to the same degree. It's much worse if we're looking at mapping final m with a final that isn't (visibly!) adjacent to an /a/, e.g. final dy or final or.  

There are similar problems trying to map the differences between other locations' behaviour as well, putting a lot of pressure on the assumption above.  We can keep the assumption if we allow for more radical transformation, but that leads to the other problems I talked about on Voynich Day in terms of reducing glyph range, word type diversity, and intelligibility.