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The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
- The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
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The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
Petrasti > 01-11-2025, 12:27 PM
I have a question for everyone. I haven't found anything about this in the forum yet. Is there already a thread in which the a to o (or vice versa) swap has been discussed? (I am of course excluding my previous thread which was not commentable because of my thesis)
Is there already an analysis on this?
Here are a few examples:
Dom dam, chol chal, dol dal, pol pal, lol lal, cheol cheal, kooiin koaiin,
dain doin, Chor char, am om, or ar, oror arar, tol tal, chom cham,
kol kal, chaiin choiin, dar dor, daiin doiin, otchor otchar, taiin toiin,
saiin soiin, c+hol c+hal, aiir oiir, chory chary, dary dory, sal sol, -
RE: The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
dashstofsk > 01-11-2025, 02:11 PM
If you were to look at some matrices of character affinities then you will see that both a and o share a liking for l and r, but otherwise they cannot be interchanged.
( Herbal A1 Affinities )
( Bio B2 Affinities ) -
RE: The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
Petrasti > 01-11-2025, 03:06 PM
Consider, for example, only the first four lines of f2v.
First, I add the words from the folio, and then the words you find in the manuscript with the o/a or a/o substitution.
kooiin - koaiin
cheo - chea
pchor - pchar
otaiin - otoiin
dain - doin
chor - char
cho - cha
daiin - doiin
chody - chady
cheor - chear
Not all words are subject to the exchange, but too many to call it a coincidence. Therefore, the question is whether anyone has already looked into this topic more intensively? -
RE: The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
dashstofsk > 01-11-2025, 04:52 PM
(01-11-2025, 03:06 PM)Petrasti Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the question is whether anyone has already looked into this topic more intensively?
I have in the past looked into this for many character pairs. The matrices of affinities will give you some clues as to which characters can possibly be interchanged. Attached are lists from language A of the most frequency a and o words and alongside the frequency of words formed by the exchange. I can't see much that is significant in this particular exchange. -
RE: The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
Petrasti > 01-11-2025, 06:08 PM
Do you know a language or old manuscripts in which a vowel exchange with always the same two vowels is typical or at least known or occurs? Or why do you think this exchange exists in the manuscripts? Do you think they are words with the same meaning or not?
Or why do you think there is a larger group of words with the vowel exchange in this system? -
RE: The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
Mauro > 01-11-2025, 06:17 PM
(01-11-2025, 06:08 PM)Petrasti Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you know a language or old manuscripts in which a vowel exchange with always the same two vowels is typical or at least known or occurs?
'Known to occour'? Standard Italian:
caso (case), casa (house), case (houses) cosa (thing), coso (thing), cose (things), cosi (things)...
raso (shaved + another couple meanings), rosa (rose, pink), roso (gnawed), reso (returned), resa (returned), risa (laughters)....
razza (race), razzo (rocket), rozzo (rough)
pazza (madwoman), pazzo (madman), pozzo (well), pozza (puddle), pizza, pezza, puzza.....
..... .... .....
And more generally,+- every feminine noun/adjective etc. ending in 'a' has a male counterpart ending in 'o', while at the plural the endings are replaced by 'e' (feminine) and 'i' (male). So I guess one can say Standard Italian 'exchanges' a lot of vowels. -
RE: The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
Petrasti > 02-11-2025, 07:22 AM
that's right, in Romance languages as well as in Spanish this exchange exists, but several words in a grammatical unit bend such as
"la chica bonita" and "el chico bonito"
I have not yet been able to find this phenomenon in Voynich. It seems that the a and o can be exchanged flexibly without a ‘rule’. Personally, I can't imagine that the accumulation involves ‘different’ words.
Why do I think this is important? Well, we are looking for systems in the manuscript and trying to understand whether it is a language cryptology or nonsense.
Perhaps this can also exclude systems or languages that cannot find a sufficient explanation. But it's just a question of how you evaluate that -
RE: The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
dashstofsk > 02-11-2025, 09:10 AM
If you are looking for a more consistent exchange between two characters in the VMS then the answer is with t and k . Unlike the Italian examples that exchange at the end of a word for grammatical reasons, t and k in the VMS exchange mid-word, rarely at the end of a word. See the attached for frequencies of the exchanges. There is a general parity in the frequencies. Almost every exchange gives a valid VMS word.
Gallows_2Leg_Exchanges.pdf (Size: 52.9 KB / Downloads: 6)
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RE: The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
rikforto > 02-11-2025, 09:33 AM
I am going to recommend You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the rest of the site for a good starting point, and you'll see it encompasses the EVA-a/o alteration you see here. It would certainly be a mistake to treat that summary as the end-all-be-all, and I have found Emma Mae Smith's (do I have that name right?) blog to be very insightful; You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and went on to develop a theory of word structure from it. I'm omitting a great many people---surely someone must have a good list of places with substantial Voynich analysis that is up to date? -
RE: The vowel exchange "a" to "o"
Jorge_Stolfi > 02-11-2025, 11:52 AM
(02-11-2025, 07:22 AM)Petrasti Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It seems that the a and o can be exchanged flexibly without a ‘rule’
Beware that transcribers often have to guess whether a glyph is an a or an o (or a y that lost its tail). Thus some of that "flexibility" may be just transcription errors.
And the (ahem! ahem!) scribes who restored and retouched faded text faced the same problem. I think I can see many cases where they could not make out the original and just guessed o or a. Or intentionally drew am intermediate glyph shape that could be read as either of them...
Thus, in statistical analyses, it may be safer to map "confusible" letters to the same letter: {a,o,y} -> o, {r,s} -> r, {ch,ih} -> ee, etc. The analysis may then miss some structure, but it would be less affected by such restoration and transcription noise.
All the best, --stolfi