An Artificial Construction

[Jorge_Stolfi]

This can show that the way prefixes and suffixes in the Voynich Manuscript behave does not occur in natural languages. I think this may be true for any normal representation of any natural language in the history of humankind.

Have you tested the East Asian monosyllabic languages - Chinese,Vietnamese, Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, ...

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a file of Mandarin (the Beijing Chinese language) in pinyin encoding. (It is in the Unicode UTF-8 encoding. You will have to download it; out web server displays it assuming the wrong encoding so it shows all garbled on your browser, and cut-paste will fail.)

Here is a python3 fragment that will read the file and convert tone diacritics to numeric tone suffixes (e.g. "shén" to "shen2") and "ü" to "uu" (e.g. "nǚ" to "nuu3"):

Code:

#! /usr/bin/python3 import os, sys, re; from sys import stdin as inp, stdout as out, stderr as err def main():   inp.reconfigure(encoding="utf-8")   out.reconfigure(encoding="utf-8")     out.write("# Created by {convert_pinyn_to_numeric.py} - do not edit.\n")   out.write("# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-\n")     pinyin_vows = r"āēīōūǖ" + r"àèìòùǜ" + r"áéíóúǘ" + r"ǎěǐǒǔǚ"   unmark_vows = r"aeiouü" * 4   ntones_nums = r"111111" + r"444444" + r"222222" + r"333333"   pats = []   subs = []   nv = len(pinyin_vows)   for i in range (nv):     pats.append(re.compile(pinyin_vows[i]))     subs.append(unmark_vows[i] + ntones_nums[i])   for line in inp:     line = line.strip()     if re.match(r"[ ]*([#]|$)", line):       continue     else:       m = re.fullmatch(r"([<][a-z][0-9.]+[>])[ ]*(.*)", line)       if m != None:         loc = m.group(1)         line = m.group(2)       else:         loc = ""       line = re.sub(r"[\]\[.,;:()]", " ", line)       words = line.split()       out.write(loc);       for word in words:         word = word.lower()         for i in range (nv):           word = re.sub(pats[i], subs[i], word)         word = re.sub(r"ü", "uu", word)         word = re.sub(r"^(.*)([0-9])(.*)$", r"\1\3\2", word)         if re.fullmatch(r"[a-z]+", word): word += "5"         out.write(" "); out.write(word)       out.write("\n")   return   # ----------------------------------------------------------------------     main()

All the best, --stolfi