Hi Anton,
in 2014, You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. discussed the idea that star labels may include a prefix corresponding to the Arabic determinative article 'al'. He identified the possible prefix with EVA:ot.
While it is quite rare to see the same prefix occurring in most labels in a Latin manuscript, this is indeed quite common in Arabic manuscripts (the | character on the right-side of each label).
These are the histograms for the most frequent initial characters of labels in You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. and Voynich Pharma and Zodiac. I have transcribed with '+' the barred-p standing for 'per' in the Latin ms.
The diagrams are overall comparable, with the most frequent character clearly standing out as an outlier. For an Arabic manuscript, I think a single character would appear at the begin of almost all labels (~100%).
Plots for the most frequent initial bigrams are quite different. The Latin ms has a flat distribution, as is expected since the second character actually is the first character of a second word following "per". In the VMS (in particular in the Zodiac) there is a strong predominance of 'ot' / 'ok' with respect to other bigrams.
I ask myself: what is the prefix?
- if it is just 'o', it is unclear why it does not attach uniformly to all characters (this preference for gallows appears in the whole ms, not only in labels)
- if it is 'ot' as Stephen thought, it is not clear why 'ok' behaves so similarly
- if 'ot' and 'ok' are two different prefixes, their nearly identical distribution is hard to explain.
We also face the more general problem of word length. Voynichese words have an average length that is comparable with that of European natural languages and labels appear to be normal words, many of which also occur in the main text. As You are not allowed to view links.
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Also, the higher frequency of o- words in the labels is symmetrical to the lower frequency of q- (You are not allowed to view links.
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"q- is added to label-words in the main text" than
"o- is added to main-text-words in labels".
In my opinion, the behaviour of the o- prefix in labels and in the main text could be suggestive of an artificial language in which there is a deeper relationship between grammar and morphology than in natural languages. In a natural language, "operators" can be applied to certain words and not others on the basis of their grammatical features, not their initial character (though it is true that, in some languages, the initial character can alter the operator).
Random and esaily rejectable examples, just to give an idea of what I mean:
- masculine nouns start with ot-, feminine with ok-, neutral with other prefixes;
- masculine nouns are constrained to start with a gallows, o- marks the nominative case, qo- marks the accusative;
- masculine nouns are constrained to start with a gallows, o- marks the singular, qo- marks the plural.
I am sure I did not explain myself clearly and this is largely due to the fact that I find the subject complex and hard to grasp. I cannot think of anything that could really explain all the observations. In my opinion, the Latin diagram you pointed out is great both for its similarity and difference with Voynichese labels. Thanks again for sharing it!