Andalusian Arabic in the Voynich Manuscript – Statistical and Morphological

[Muhammadzubair#1]

This paper presents a cautious statistical and morphological analysis proposing — but not claiming to confirm — that the Voynich Manuscript's writing system may exhibit structural features consistent with Andalusian Arabic.

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WHAT THIS PAPER CLAIMS AND DOES NOT CLAIM
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This paper does not claim to have deciphered the manuscript. All analysis is organized into three strictly separated layers:

Layer 1 — Objective measurements (independently verifiable, no interpretation required)
Layer 2 — Structural patterns of uncertain significance
Layer 3 — Speculative hypotheses, clearly labeled at every point

Important methodological note: EVA is a glyph-labeling system, not a phonetic transcription. No argument in this paper claims that an EVA token matches an Arabic word because they look or sound similar. All such phonetic reasoning is explicitly avoided.

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LAYER 1: OBJECTIVE CORPUS STATISTICS (voynich.nu IT2a-n, N = 36,473 tokens)
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• Total tokens: 36,473 | Unique word types: 8,461 | Type/token ratio: 0.232
• Index of Coincidence: 0.0030 (below English ≈ 0.067, Arabic ≈ 0.076, random ≈ 0.038)
• Suffix '-dy': 1,125 word types = 17.4% of all tokens
• Suffix '-edy': 424 word types = 11.2% of all tokens
• Suffix '-iin': 11.3% of all tokens
• 'qok-' prefix family: 269 word types = 8.4% of all tokens
• Folios analyzed: 225 (all sections)

These figures are directly verifiable. No interpretation is attached to them.

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LAYER 2: STRUCTURAL PATTERNS (uncertain significance)
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• 'ch-' begins 5,850 tokens (16.0%); 'qo-' begins 5,202 tokens (14.3%); 'sh-' begins 3,159 tokens (8.7%)
• Word-final sequences '-dy', '-iin', '-edy', '-eey' together cover ~45% of all tokens
• The qok- family shows fixed initial + variable terminal structure (qokeey 308, qokeedy 301, qokain 277, qokedy 265, qokaiin 262...)

This prefix-plus-variable-root architecture is CONSISTENT WITH Semitic root-and-pattern morphology — but is equally consistent with a cipher convention or transcription artifact. No determination is made here.

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LAYER 3: SPECULATIVE HYPOTHESES (low confidence — offered for community testing)
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Nine proposed EVA-to-Arabic mappings, all marked LOW CONFIDENCE:

EVA 'ol' → al- (ال) definite article
EVA 'or' → aw (أو) or/conjunction
EVA 'dy' → dhi (ذي) which/that
EVA 'cthom' → thum (ثوم) garlic
EVA 'chor' → buraq (بورق) borax
EVA 'otal' → ratl (رطل) weight unit
EVA 'qol' → qala (قال) stated/cited
EVA 'shol' → sahl (سهل) easy/simple
EVA 'cthy' → kathir (كثير) many/multiple

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FOUR CANDIDATE DECODED LINES
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Applying the above mappings to four folios produces these candidate readings:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 12 | or.shol.cthom.chor.cthy → "Or: simply — garlic with borax — many doses"
Consistent with: Ibn al-Baytar, Al-Mughni Ch.7; Abu l-Ala Zuhr, Mujarrabat Frag.2
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 6 | ychtaiin.chor.cthom.otal.dam → "Prescribe: borax — garlic — one ratl — [for blood]"
Consistent with: Ibn Wafid, Al-Adwiya al-Mufradah; Ibn al-Baytar Ch.6
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 9 | oeeo.dal.chor.cthom → "And evidence/guide: borax with garlic"
Consistent with: Abu l-Ala Zuhr, Mujarrabat; Ibn al-Baytar Ch.15
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 19 | qol.shey → "The authority stated" (standard citation formula)
Consistent with: Ibn al-Baytar, Al-Jami' (formula used 100+ times)

Note: Consistency with medieval sources confirms only internal coherence, not correctness. This is acknowledged as circular if used as proof. True confirmation requires an independent researcher to arrive at the same readings from the raw glyphs without prior knowledge of the proposed mappings.

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WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY CONFIRM THIS HYPOTHESIS
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1. A qualified Andalusian Arabic paleographer examining the glyphs directly (not EVA) and proposing correspondences independently
2. Formal entropy comparison of Voynich word structure against an Andalusian Arabic corpus
3. Detection of structural parallelism with a known Arabic source text
4. Empirical baseline: 10,000 permutation trials to calculate the actual chance rate
5. Expert assessment of whether the proposed grammar skeleton matches attested Andalusian Arabic morphology

Until these are addressed, this should be treated as a structured research proposal, not a finding.

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AI USE DISCLOSURE
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This research was conducted with assistance from Claude (Anthropic) and Grok for corpus analysis and text drafting. Research direction, source selection, and analytical framework were provided by the author. No human peer review was conducted prior to posting.

Full paper (APA 7 format) attached as PDF.
Feedback from Arabic linguists and Voynich specialists especially welcome.