A family of grammars for Voynichese

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I made a quick check (very quick, so excuse me if I made mistakes, and with the limit that it refers to the whole text of the VMS), with the occurrences of the 8 most frequent words which end in 'aiin' vs. the corresponding 'air' word.

daiin vs. dair = 834/109 = 7.65
aiin vs. air = 529/78 = 6.78
qokaiin vs. qokair = 259/21 = 12.33
okaiin vs. okair = 152/25 = 6.08
saiin vs. sair = 129/26 = 4.96
qotaiin vs. qotair = 83/5 = 16.6
kaiin vs. kair = 63/16 = 3.93

They look to me a bit too much spread out to support the hypothesis that 'iin' is randomly replaced by 'ir' with some probability (but I ran no statistical tests)

Thanks for running the test!

I notice that the two longer qo words have high values of the ratio R = "iin/ir", namely 12.3 and 16.6; whereas for the other shorter non-qo words the values of R range between 3.9 and 7.7.

The "ir = iin" theory could still be saved if those qo words happen to occur mostly at the start of lines or paragraphs, or after (invisible) sentence breaks.  Then it may be that the Author's handwriting was neater right after those break points, but got sloppier after that.

Or perhaps both the "iin" and the "ir" versions of the "short" words above were valid, with the original ratio R0 = "iin/ir" being around 7; whereas only the "iin" versions of the qo words were valid.  Then, if only ~8% of the words ending in "iin" got changed into "ir", indiscriminately, the resulting frequencies would be roughly as listed.

All the best, --stolfi