Brainstorming Session: Mapping Voynich with Graphs

[quimqu]

I post here a fast example of what can be done with the Graph.

I have compared words not by how they look, but by how they behave in the text. If two words tend to appear in the same contexts, the graph shows them as similar. The method produces a list of similar pairs and also groups of words (clusters). This allows me to detect potential orthographic variants, scribal inconsistencies, or grammatical categories.

Many pairs and clusters appear, but here I only explain the first three of each as examples. Here are the first three pairs:

Pair	Similarity	Shared Left Contexts	Shared Right Contexts
am ~ oly	0.912	or, aiin	shey
cthey ~ ychey	0.870	daiin	chey
ckhol ~ qokor	0.870	daiin	daiin

- The first line is interesting: am and oly look completely different, but the graph shows that both often appear after or or aiin and are followed by shey. 
- The second pair, cthey ~ ychey, shows the classic frame daiin … chey. 
- The third pair, ckhol ~ qokor, shows two forms that both sit inside daiin … daiin.

The same idea extends to clusters. The graph groups together whole families of words that share context. Here the first three found:

- Cluster 1 is very large, with more than a hundred words. It is shaped by the common formulas with daiin, shedy, ol, chey. This cluster includes the first three pairs above, which are representative of the whole family.
- Cluster 3 is small, only six words. It mixes very short forms like l and d with longer forms like laiin or lkaiin. The shared contexts are o, chey, y, chedy. It is puzzling that single character words are clustered with long ones... maybe abbreviations?
- Cluster 4 is also small, again with six words. It is centred on words like chol, sho, okeol. Pairs such as dor ~ ockhey or kchol ~ ykeey belong here. This cluster seems to be a family of variants with similar endings and usage.

These are only the first examples. Many more pairs and clusters can be studied in the same way, and the graph makes it possible to explore their behaviour systematically.

I encourage you to post ideas to explore the graph. For example: if you suspect that one word is a misspelling by the scribe, I can check the "correct" word and the "wrong" word to see if they behave differently or not. If they do behave differently, then it probably wasn’t just a scribal error.