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the comparison of sh and ch
- the comparison of sh and ch
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the comparison of sh and ch
Petrasti > 29-08-2025, 02:52 PM
I used You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to compare the words.
In total, I compared 4357 words in all folios that have an “c+h” (at the beginning, in the middle, at the end, or standing alone) with the change to “ch.” There are 3815 identical words that only differ in c+h to ch. (including multiple occurrences) That corresponds to 88%. In other words, around 88% (deviations of a few percent are possible) of the words that appear in the manuscript with c+h are identical except for the change to ch.
Is the c+h to ch change the same word or two different words? I think we are dealing here with a sound change.
The following further anomalies exist:
The individual occurrences that do not show a c+h to ch change are halfway longer than we are used to in the manuscript. Often these are compound words that also exist individually in the manuscript.
Here is a brief example:
c+heolkchy = c+heol kchy
otalc+hedy = otal c+hedy
okeolc+hey = okeol c+hey
dalteoc+hy = dal teo c+hy
There are a few more peculiarities that require closer examination.
for example:
root word stem
chor
also exist as:
c+hor, cThor, cPhor, cFhor, ckhor, kchor, pchor, fchor, tchor, qotchor, qopchor, qokchor, qofchor, cheor, c+heor, dchor, ochor, ychor,
the comparison of sh and ch.pdf (Size: 1,014.85 KB / Downloads: 14)
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RE: the comparison of sh and ch
tavie > 29-08-2025, 03:51 PM
Hi, Petrasti. You might find the discussions in the below two threads helpful:- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
It's worth also noting that the two glyphs can behave differently depending on the position of the paragraph. /sh/ is much happier in the Top Row of paragraphs. - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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RE: the comparison of sh and ch
ReneZ > 29-08-2025, 11:39 PM
It's a good observation, and has been noted before by several people.
(You will find that this is quite typical).
There are several such 'pairs'.
Most obvious are k and t , and f and p , but also word-initial o and qo .
They don't all work equally well, and some depend more on which part of the MS one is looking at than others.
d and s are a less obvious example. Their frequency is rather unequal.
This is even more true for constructions like oke and cKh . -
RE: the comparison of sh and ch
Petrasti > 30-08-2025, 08:47 AM
Hi Tavie, thank you for the interesting links.
Hi ReneZ, based on current knowledge, do you think it is a language or cryptography? -
RE: the comparison of sh and ch
ReneZ > 30-08-2025, 09:27 AM
As I wrote elsewhere (not too long ago), if it is a cipher, then there is language behind it.
The alternative is a meaningless text, or a medieval hoax.
I think both are possible, but I have a minor tendency to still think that the text is meaningful.
The conversion from meaningful text to what we have may not be a cipher in the general understanding of the term. -
RE: the comparison of sh and ch
Petrasti > 30-08-2025, 07:38 PM
I've already read a few of your posts, I will take the time in the next few days to read more of your posts.
one more question
how do you see the possibility that the gallow signs and letters like y,d,r,qo,o could be standing in front of letters of the root word stem but do not belong to the base word itself? or sometimes with both in succession (gallow sign and letter), e.g. ot, yt, ok, ak, op, qot ... (as I have inserted it in red in my first text above) -
RE: the comparison of sh and ch
Jorge_Stolfi > 30-08-2025, 07:57 PM
There are many languages where nouns (or other word classes) can be preceded by single-phoneme or single-syllable words to change their grammatical function, without changing the core semantics of the stem. Usually, whether those particles are written attached to the next word or as free-standing word is only a matter or orthographic tradition. Even English has the "prefixes" /ð/ ('the') and /a/ or /ei/ or /an/ ('a') to indicate whether a noun is definite (mentioned before in the discourse) or indefinite (being introduced now). It is only tradition that says we should write 'the cat' rather than 'ðcat' or 'thcat'.
Prepositions in Romance languages can also be seen as prefixes for nouns, that change their grammatical function just like the case inflections did in Classical Latin. (That may not hold for prepositions in English since they can be moved away from the noun, as in danglng participles.)
In Arabic and Hebrew, the definite article is written as part of the word (and there are even special ligatures that combine it with the next letter). I just learned that in Armenian or Albanian (I just forgot which) a verb is negated by prefixing a letter /ch/ to it.
So it is perfectly possible that y, d, r, qo, o are articles, prepositions, or other grammatical prefixes that, even though they are written attached to the next word, they don't change its basic "stem" meaning.
All the best, --jorge -
RE: the comparison of sh and ch
ReneZ > 31-08-2025, 01:11 AM
(30-08-2025, 07:38 PM)Petrasti Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I've already read a few of your posts, I will take the time in the next few days to read more of your posts.
one more question
how do you see the possibility that the gallow signs and letters like y,d,r,qo,o could be standing in front of letters of the root word stem but do not belong to the base word itself? or sometimes with both in succession (gallow sign and letter), e.g. ot, yt, ok, ak, op, qot ... (as I have inserted it in red in my first text above)
I specifically meant some of my comments in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
On the other question, just to be clear: I do not have any answers that would convince myself. For every thought I can see problems with it.
Generally, I don't think of stems, prefixes and suffixes in the grammatical sense. One can use these terms for word fragments that tend to appear near the start, in the middle or near the end. Still, there are characters that are happy to be both at the start and at the end, like y , l , r .
For me, this is all part of a single system.
Most importantly, I am not convinced of the most generally applied asumption, namely that the words that we see in the MS are whole words in the grammatical sense. I am not saying that they are not. Just saying that they may not be. -
RE: the comparison of sh and ch
Petrasti > 31-08-2025, 09:14 AM
Do you have an opinion on this?
I'm not sure whether this topic is known with regard to (I call it) "mutations" in general. It is noticeable that the ‘basic words’ if we assume that the letters are prefixes (or whatever without belonging to the base word) are subject to a vowel swap from "o" to "a" or vice versa. Not all words, but too many to ignore this phenomenon.
Are there any theories or topics on this? Is there a language or dialect from the Indo-European branch that has such a vowel exchange?
I'll add a few examples
dor dar
dol dal
kooiin koaiin
chor char
chol chal
kol kal
kor kar
lol lal
dam dom -
RE: the comparison of sh and ch
MarcoP > 31-08-2025, 10:18 AM
(31-08-2025, 09:14 AM)Petrasti Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you have an opinion on this?
I'm not sure whether this topic is known with regard to (I call it) "mutations" in general. It is noticeable that the ‘basic words’ if we assume that the letters are prefixes (or whatever without belonging to the base word) are subject to a vowel swap from "o" to "a" or vice versa. Not all words, but too many to ignore this phenomenon.
Are there any theories or topics on this? Is there a language or dialect from the Indo-European branch that has such a vowel exchange?
Couples of similar glyphs are often interchangeable in the Voynich manuscript.
E.g. EVA:k/t ch/sh i/ii e/ee
See figure 1 in Timm and Schinner’s paper.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
In general, similar characters and similar words behave similarly (they tend to appear immediately next to the same characters/words). This of course is different from natural languages, where similar words can behave very differently (e.g. raid/said alter/altar miner/minor). Similar words that do behave similarly in European natural languages often are the result of suffixes (fault/faults mend/mending, many more examples in more inflected languages like German or Latin, but always according to well-defined rules).
About ch/sh and k/t, there’s a great discussion of their position in lines and paragraphs in Patrick Feaster’s 2022 Malta paper You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
For instance, these plots form You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. show that the prefix sh- is slightly more frequent than ch- at line start. For the second word in a line, sh- and ch- have more or less the same frequency. Mid-line, ch- is twice as frequent as sh-. At line end, ch- is almost 4x as frequent as sh-.