Qokeedy

Even a casual acquaintance with the Voynich language reveals that words are very obviously grouped into what I call families. Choose any word and you will find that it is related to a whole group of similar words. We don’t need a mountain of statistics to demonstrate that this is so: it is obvious. It is one of the most notable things about the Voynich language; it is textured by words that are very similar. Indeed, in nearly all cases we can find an almost exhaustive group of combinations of letters constituting a family of closely related words. The text is characterized by apparent combinatorics. Every word appears in all or at least many of its possible combinations, apparently according to certain rules.

This is certainly a lesson to be learned from the pursuit of the word qokechy in the text. As explained in a prior post, this is the word I first chose to investigate at the beginnings of my studies, as a doorway into the text. My method was to select any word (not too common, not too rare) and pursue it relentlessly in the run of the text, observing its behavior. One of the things this reveals immediately is that qokechy is not an isolated word. It belongs to a family of similar words. Each of these words seem to be a permutation of a common form. It is not clear what causes these permutations or what they mean.

For instance, qokechy  qokechy appears to be in the family of words that includes qokeedy  qokeedy with qokeedy being the far more common word. How are the two words related? Are they entirely different words or are they, perhaps, the same word in two different forms signifying a grammatical difference?

This is the distinct impression one forms. One begins to suspect that rather than different words, these ‘families’ may be variations on the same word. We witness the permutations of the same word according to some system of rules. It is so systematic, in fact, that one suspects some system of exhaustive combinatorics.

The behavior of qokeedy is even more striking than qokechy. It is strongly favored in Dialect B (Currier Language B) which is also to say it is found in some sections of the work more than others. Specifically, it is strongly characteristic of the Nymph Section (called baneological) and then the Star Section at the end of the work (wrongly called the 'recipe' section.) It is only found occasionally here and there outside of these sections. There are over 300 cases in total but it occurs in two very strong and obvious concentrations. It is a rare word until page f75r. Then it erupts into the text until f84v. It returns to being rare until the final Star Section where it erupts into the text again.

It is rare in most parts of the work, but conspicuously common in two particular sections and only those sections.

Qokechy, which seems to be derivative, is much the same, but is even more characteristic of the final Star Section.

The sudden eruption of qokeedy in the Nymph Section.

Now, from a general reading of the illustrations – reading the text as a Mutus Liber – we know that the nymphs are connected to (if they are not personifications of) the fixed stars. (In fact, the nymphs are personifications of light – and especially the light of the alpenglow – and thus are they blonde and rosy cheeked.) We see in the Zodiac Section that the nymphs are associated with particular fixed stars. This idea is quite explicit in the illustrations.

In that case, here we see that qokeedy and related words in that family correspond to this. What we see in the illustrations is matched by this linguistic phenomenon. We can conclude, therefore, that the word qokeedy (and its cognates) in some way concerns the correspondences between nymphs and stars. We do not know what the word might be, but from context we can establish that this to what it must pertain.

One thing of which we can be sure is that the Voynich manuscript, being a work of late medieval cosmology, concerns correspondences. What corresponds with what? This is the whole habit of the medieval cosmological mind. We can expect the text to be concerned with the same. It would seem that the qokeedy family of words - qokechy included - is part of the vocabulary setting out correspondences between the nymphs and the stars.


R. B.