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• "Abnormal" words

  stopsquark > 28-04-2025, 08:16 AM

  While I'm aware that we don't know what the grammatical rules are for Voynichese, we have some general sense of how common certain character combinations are- for instance, a minim sequence is almost never found at the start of a word, consecutive benched gallows are fairly uncommon, etc. I'm curious about how many words we can find that apparently violate the conventions of the system.
  
  One that I can think of off the top of my head- in the Rosettes map on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , the center of the upper-leftmost path contains the word "ddssSex" in EVA. This is one of very few places in the MS that we see an x, a doubled s, OR a doubled d. What other rare word-forms like this exist? Bonus points if they're robust to transcription choices- i.e., if no matter how you interpret ambiguous letterforms, the words incorporate characters or strings that are uncommon.

• RE: "Abnormal" words

  oshfdk > 28-04-2025, 09:52 AM

  Hi and welcome!
  
  This can be automated, one can compute expected counts of bigrams given character frequencies and then compare with actual numbers. For example, I'm attaching a filtered transliteration file (based on #=IVTFF Eva- 1.7 with some simplifications) where some of the rarest bigrams made of common characters are highlighted. Then it's possible to take it one step further and look for rare bigram clusters, etc, etc. 
  
  
    rarebigrams.txt (Size: 14.78 KB / Downloads: 10)

• RE: "Abnormal" words

  oshfdk > 28-04-2025, 10:50 AM

  Interestingly, when filtering for lines that contain at least two instances of rare bigrams and relatively close to one another, I only get this:
  
  

  Code:

  % cat rarebigrams.txt | perl -ne "print if /\(.{,10}\(/"
f46v.8,=Pt      okeedchsy.qokeedy.chetedar.or.a( ic )k( yy )
fRos.14,@L0    ( dd )( ss )chx

  
  So, it looks like the one from the Rosettes that you gave at the example could be the weirdest of them all. The other one, which is ai{cky}y in the transliteration file, is more like aicky or aiIky in the MS. Still quite weird looking.
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