Thank you all for your comments!
I am glad you find the graphs useful!
(22-08-2017, 09:08 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Now these are interesting and clear statistics, Marco.
Of course, since these offer for a direct way to compare Voynichese to other languages, I wonder what the stats would look like for a language without common endings in nouns (-us, -a, -um). Do you have an automatic way to count the initial and final letters in a text or does this have to be done manually?
The number crunching is done by an automatic script, but some manual work is needed to prepare the data and draw the graphs. If a good transcription is available, it's not much work.
A language that has no specific suffixes should generate a flat histogram for the main text. If the labels are the usual Greek-Latin names, the label suffix histogram will have the spikes we have already seen for Latin and Italian: the two histograms should be quite different. If the labels are not borrowed, the two histograms could be identical, but of course the best thing would be to see what happens with an actual case. If you can suggest a transcribed text that you think relevant, I will do my best to produce the graphs.
(22-08-2017, 09:15 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is almost certainly going to be a larger element of borrowing among plant names than the text as a whole. (It should be possible to isolate structurally different words as the most likely loanwords.)
However, the lack of [q] in plant names is also seen with star names and zodiac labels. Were all three to have the same source language, that would be fine. Yet it is less likely, if they come from two or more different sources, that they would lack the same characteristics.
I agree, Emma!
There is hope that plant names are partly borrowed (and hence potentially easier to recognize). Yet the single-character graphs do not provide information supporting this idea. It is quite possible that if and when names were borrowed, they were “Voynichized” like in Greek->Latin->Italian.
kyparissos cupressus cipresso
narkissos narcissus narciso
huakinthos jacintus giacinto
But it's also possible that the level of detail of these last histograms is not sufficient.
(23-08-2017, 09:40 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Or does it just mean that initial o favors nouns? Or even 'names'?
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"[ot, ok]: the increase in these should be a result of the lower [qo]."
There's plenty of evidence that suggests a relationship between qo- and o-. The most obvious one possibly is that, if you remove the starting q from a word that occurs at least twice, 90% of the times you get an o- word that actually appears in the ms.
So, if o- favor nouns, also q- likely does.
Emma's observation suggests that the increase in o- might be a consequence of the disappearance of q-. For all I know, this might still be related to nouns, but we currently don't have much evidence to support this idea. Emma is currently researching You are not allowed to view links.
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As I wrote above, the single letter diagrams don't provide much detail with such a small alphabet. But the two letters diagrams highlighted some differences which might prove interesting (e.g. the higher -ry -ly frequencies in labels).