Lines as lists

This is a further attempt to present lines of Voynich text in meaningful or at least suggestive ways.

I proposed some time ago that the Voynich text, although presented as running prose, might in fact consist of lists of vords in the manner of an inventory of some kind. Others have suggested the same.

Do we find patterns of organisation in the text that might be consistent with this?

A possible model might be the following:

Let us make a basic distinction between vords that contain a GALLOWS glyph, and those that do not. That is, the four elevated, conspicuous glyphs, including in their ‘benched’ forms.

This is surely a justifiable distinction. The gallows glyphs are important to the text – whatever that importance might be – and it must surely be of some importance whether a vord contains such a glyph or not.

We can assume that vords without such a glyph are in some way secondary.

We will leave aside the question of [ch] and [sh]. They are not gallows glyphs as such, and so are not counted. Only the four elevated glyphs.

A better distinction might be those with and without a CORE, by the Stolfi model, but any gallows glyph will be a core anyway, and in the first instance their status is clear to the eye and I want to keep the method simple for demonstration purposes.

* * *

Now, with any line of Voynich text, make a hard [BREAK] at every vord containing a gallows glyph.

Take this line from pg 107, for instance:

<f107v.P.39;H>

okain.cheor.olkaiin.oain.cheary.raiin.okaiin.odaiin.okaiin.y-

We apply breaks wherever we encounter a vord with a gallows glyph:

okain.cheor.[BREAK] olkaiin.oain.cheary.raiin.[BREAK] okaiin.odaiin.[BREAK] okaiin.y-

We depict it thus:

okain.cheor.
olkaiin.oain.cheary.raiin.
okaiin.odaiin.
okaiin.y-

And we can present it as a list thus:

1. okain.cheor.
2. olkaiin.oain.cheary.raiin.
3. okaiin.odaiin.
4. okaiin.y-

The suggestion here is that each vord with a gallows is an ITEM and vords without a gallows glyph are subsiduary or additional to the item to which they are appended.

The text is remarkably amenable to such a reconstruction. Only rarely do we get unweildly clusters of non-glyph vords. Usually we generate a list of gallows vords appended by one or two non-gallows vords in each case, if at all.

In this model we would assume non-gallows vords - [daiin] is one - to be in some way FUNCTIONAL.

Here are some lines presented as lists in this manner, selected at random:

<f29v.P.7;H>

1. qotcho.
2. kchor.daiin.
3. ykaiin.dy-shdy-cho.
4. cthy.
5. sheky-

<f85r1.P.24;H>

1. tedair.
2. ykeedy.dain.cheedy.
3. qokor.chedy.
4. okar.
5. sheekchy.
6. qokedy.olchedy-

<f108r.P.14;H>

1. polchal.shol.
2. qokor.shedy.
3. pcholy.
4. qokal.
5. opchdy.
6. ofal.shor.
7. qokaiin.
8. otalod-

<f16v.P.10;H>

1. qokchy.chydy.
2. ykchy.
3. chckhy.
4. otain.
5. cthor.
6. cthy-

<f111r.P.44;H>

1. pchedar.
2. oteeol.
3. lkeedain.
4. okeam.sheo.
5. teolkedain.shal.
6. keey.
7. lteeal.cheal.
8. oty-

<f13v.P.2;H>

1. oko.
2. qokol.chodal.
3. otchol.
4. cphol.
5. choty-

It is certainly not hard to reconfigure line 14 on page 85r2 as a list:

<f85r2.P.14;H>

1. qtchedy.qodar.
2. qotedar.
3. qokar.
4. qotchd.
5. qotom-

It is arguable that [qodar] might be an ITEM here as well, but we will keep to a strict and simple rule: only gallows glyphs.

* * *

The text looks like running prose, but it is much more list-like than it appears. This is a simple method of demonstrating how it might be so. What the vords signify and what the gallows letters are remains an open question. What information is encoded in the ITEMS and how is it modified by FUNCTION vords?

It is enough at the moment to show that our apparently prose text might be a set of lists. The assumption the text is prose might be wrong and might lead to many misguided studies.

Recently, for instance, I encountered a study of word pairs by Mark Fincher: Word Pair Permutation Analysis of natural language samples and it’s value for characterizing the ‘Voynich Manuscript’. It is a study of structures between words and Fincher concludes from it:

‘Voynichese’ is not a natural language in it’s own right. If the VMs text is derived from a plaintext in a natural language, it must have undergone some disruption of word order.

But in fact what the study shows is that - in its word order - the text does not behave like running prose.  The "disruption of word order" suspected by Fincher might simply be that the plaintext is a set of lists.

R. B.