I’m convinced (or at least for now I want to convince myself) that the Voynich has meaning. And I’ve been looking for an internally coherent way to explain how simply adding or removing
e seems to “modify” words. One passage that really does my head in is these three lines on You are not allowed to view links.
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qokedy dy sheety qokedy qokeedy qokechdy lol
qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy ldy
yshedy qokeedy qokeedy olkeedy otey koldy
How can one write the "same" word so many times with such tiny variations across just three lines? What kind of puzzle is this? I know this is not new, neither the concludions, but I tried to get to some sort of explanation by my own.
Just for fun, an example of translation (I am not saying it is the translation!) that could fit this puzzle could be:
It moves now; it; it sees now; it moves now; it keeps moving; it moves back; then
it keeps moving, it keeps moving; it moves now, it moves now; it keeps moving; again
now it is seen; it keeps moving, it keeps moving; it keeps showing; it turns; it holds.
How on earth do I dare suggest something like this?
First, I don’t think
qokedy, qokeedy, olkeedy... are nouns, adjectives, or adverbs here
- Not nouns: in these lines there isn’t a normal noun structure. You get long chains of the same form (
qokedy/qokeedy…) with no clear head, no determiners, no case-like markers hanging off a main noun. Repeating a noun 4 or 5 times in a row with nothing else is odd prose.
- Not adjectives: adjectives usually sit next to a noun or after a copula ("X is Y"). Here, the repeated items stand on their own in a row; there’s nothing obvious they’re describing.
- Not adverbs/connectors: we actually see
dy by itself in these lines (and also
ldy). If anything is a connector/particle, that’s the better candidate. The bigger repeated forms look like clause heads, not side words.
Given the way these forms repeat as self-contained units, the only thing that really makes sense here is that they’re verbal particles, little bits that carry or mark an action. They behave like tiny predicate pieces you can string together. Read this way, the lines aren’t listing things or describing a noun; they’re doing things.
In this context -
dy would work as a small grammatical piece (think "it/me/you" or a little helper like "is/does") that can appear alone (
dy, ldy) or stuck to a root. The
e before it (making -
edy, -eedy, sometimes -
eeedy) looks like a simple link/setting: sometimes you need it, sometimes you don’t, and sometimes you see a double
ee.
So in these lines you’re seeing lots of root + (
e/ee) +
dy acting like mini-predicates: "verbish" units, lined up one after another.
Very briefly (from my counts on the whole corpus):
-
qok is almost always at the start of the word (~99.6%). That makes it look like a root, not a suffix or filler.
- Endings for
qok* split into two big families: a -
dy/-edy/-eedy band (a big chunk), and a -
ain/-aiin band (also big). The first band fits what we see on You are not allowed to view links.
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qok-(e)-dy). The second band might be a different use of the same roots.
- olk looks similar to
qok, but seems to “need”
e before
-dy even more strongly.
-
sh is more flexible: both
shedy and
shdy exist, and
sh also appears alone elsewhere.
Tiny but telling facts:
qokdy is extremely rare (4 tokens),
olkdy basically doesn’t occur, while
shdy does (34). That feels like different root classes: some roots "want" or "need" the linking
e, some don’t.
In short: across the manuscript,
qok/olk/sh behave like roots, and -
dy is the little piece that often comes after them, with
e/ee as a simple on/off/stronger "setting".