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Some letters aren't letters

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Some letters aren't letters
RE: Some letters aren't letters

ReneZ > 24-02-2017, 10:16 AM

The case of q is even more interesting.

This character appears exclusively at the start of words, and is essentially always followed by o.
Furthermore, it is quite frequent.
Thirdly, the same words without the leading q also occur.
Then, finally, it is not used in label words.

Mapping this character to any plain text letter simply cannot work.

There are other explanations that could make more sense though. Just to give a few examples, (not meaning to be exhaustive, and not suggesting that I firmly believe in either of them):

Linguistically, this could represent a 'stop'. I don't know if there are any known examples where these are written. However, they would make sense in running text and might not be needed in front of single words. Also the next character would have to be a vowel. (Looking forward to Emma's comment on this).

Alternatively, they could be similar to the Greek 'spiritus'. (Vague memories of my one year of classical Greek).
These also only occur with vowels.

Things would look a bit better if one considered qo as a unit rather than q. In this case, one does not even lose a character in the Voynichese alphabet. The strict word-initial usage remains as a major problem though.

What else could this be?

Let's just make a thought experiment. Let's assume that someone took a text, and converted some word-initial consonants as follows:

t -> ok
s -> qok
r -> ot
n -> qot

I am not saying that this is what was really done, but it would have all sorts of interesting effects.
1) Four plain text characters are mapped to four Voynichese characters. so that balances nicely.
2) This would explain why q is only word-initial, always followed by o
3) It is verbose, and reduces entropy.

Something like this *could* be *part of* the solution.
RE: Some letters aren't letters

Koen G > 24-02-2017, 10:36 AM

Your explanation doesn't account for the fact that it is rare in labels though. I'd be more inclined to explain it as an abbreviation or rather a symbol that stands for a common prefix or proclitic. If this is syntactic like Latin -que, the absence from labels is accounted for.
RE: Some letters aren't letters

ReneZ > 24-02-2017, 10:46 AM

(24-02-2017, 10:36 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Your explanation doesn't account for the fact that it is rare in labels though. I'd be more inclined to explain it as an abbreviation or rather a symbol that stands for a common prefix or proclitic. If this is syntactic like Latin -que, the absence from labels is accounted for.

It was just a thought experiment and in its simple form it certainly cannot work.
The main point was that q (or even qo) cannot be a rendition of a normal character (letter) in a normal plain text.
It has to be 'something else'.

One has to be really careful with abbreviations. Expanding abbreviations lowers the entropy.
Going from 'Voynichese' to 'plain text' one almost certainly needs to increase the entropy, so this process should ideally not include expanding abbreviations.
The word final y (topic of a future post) may have been inspired by the Latin abbreviation for -us, but we can be certain that it does not mean this in Voynichese.
RE: Some letters aren't letters

Davidsch > 24-02-2017, 12:04 PM

"qo it is not used in label words"

Rene. I am at work at this moment and can not check everything but:

Labels:

f75v.L1.8 : qo kal
f67v2.L.3
f66r.L.3
f75v.L3.29
f66r.L.13
ros.f86r5.B12

----

And since you're on a roll: but what is going on with the letter S ?

Even if you consider Sh as being not really Sh but for example c5h (where 5= something else than S) then still the letter itself behaves strange.
RE: Some letters aren't letters

ReneZ > 24-02-2017, 01:57 PM

(24-02-2017, 12:04 PM)Davidsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.f75v.L1.8 : qo kal
f67v2.L.3
f66r.L.3
f75v.L3.29
f66r.L.13
ros.f86r5.B12

With one possible exception, none of these are labels in the strict sense, i.e. a single word written near a drawing.
The exception is the first one, pairs of words written above the nymphs, and in two cases the second word starts with q.
RE: Some letters aren't letters

VViews > 24-02-2017, 02:00 PM

Hi Davidsch,
thanks for bringing those up.
The labels that use initial qo seem to be unusual and limited to two types which are perfectly exemplified in the folios you refer to:
In the first case (66r) the qo is not an angular 4 shape but looks rather like a rounded shape, like a c with a descending bar. I wonder if there is a distinction between the usual angular q and this more rounded one.
In the second case, the alignment of "labels" in 75v actually makes me wonder if these are labels at all, or in fact sentences broken up by the pillars or whatever those are in the illustration.
RE: Some letters aren't letters

Anton > 24-02-2017, 02:28 PM

About the exculsivity of the qo bigram. There is at least one occurrence where q is followed not by o, but by EVA &163; (don't remember where's that). Also, there are occurrences where an "apostrophe" is placed in between q and o.
RE: Some letters aren't letters

Sam G > 24-02-2017, 02:30 PM

(24-02-2017, 10:16 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The case of q is even more interesting.

This character appears exclusively at the start of words, and is essentially always followed by o.
Furthermore, it is quite frequent.
Thirdly, the same words without the leading q also occur.
Then, finally, it is not used in label words.

Mapping this character to any plain text letter simply cannot work.

There's really no problem at all with a sound that can only occur at the beginning of words, and the absence in labels is easily explained if q is a prefix that serves a grammatical function used in writing sentences that is not needed in labeling individual items.

The VMS text cannot be a verbose encoding of a European language because the words are too short, and even if you ignore spaces there are not enough long repeated sequences. The labels obviously can't be verbosely encoded. There's no way around this.

A verbose encoding of a monosyllabic language could still be a possibility (though it's not really what I think is going on).

Also, there's a pattern where qokol is more common than okol, but otol is more common than qotol, and this pattern is found in many sets of words sharing the same ending. This shows that there is some kind of relationship between the words okol qokol otol and qotol (and among the words in other four-word sets of this type) that is going to be hard to explain as something other than the intrinsic grammar/morphology of some kind of language.
RE: Some letters aren't letters

Anton > 24-02-2017, 02:32 PM

Quote:In the first case (66r) the qo is not an angular 4 shape but looks rather like a rounded shape, like a c with a descending bar. I wonder if there is a distinction between the usual angular q and this more rounded one.

I'm quite sure that there is no difference and, moreover, that that's the exact way of how q is decomposed - namely, into a vertical and a c-like shape with the prolonged lower curl.
RE: Some letters aren't letters

ReneZ > 24-02-2017, 02:32 PM

The character y is interesting in yet another way.
It is very frequent, and it seems to behave almost normally.

However, when one makes a list of the vocabulary of Voynichese words, one find that more than one third of all words ends with a y.

I just cannot see how any natural language would behave in this way.

Linguistically / phonetically I also don't see any way out here, but I am not the expert.

It almost seems as if it has no further function beside saying 'end of word'.

Or, tongue firmly placed in cheek:

-y -> default word ending
-r -> word ending (variant 2)
-iin -> word ending (variant 3)
-l -> word ending (variant 4)

This of course hints at an indication of tones, for a tonal language, but I am fairly confident (without knowing for certain) that this would be anachronistic.

In any case, for me y is another character that cannot be mapped to a letter.
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Some letters aren't letters

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