Re: The letters <p> and <f>, again

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene Zandbergen)]

Stolfi wrote:

> Indeed, swapping <k> for <t> in a whole word generally produces
> another valid word.  Ditto for swapping <p> with <f>.  *But these
> swaps change the word frequencies substantially*, and there
> doesn't seem to be a clear pattern.
> 
> So I would rather believe that <k> and <t> are "phonetically" similar,
> but semantically distinct (like "t" and "d" in Spanish or Italian,
> say), and that the vocabulary is so "dense" that almost any
> phonetically valid string is a common word.

Well, this observation would make perfect sense if the VMs were a
rather phonetic rendering of some language. In that case 'oteey'
and 'okeey' are the same but only pronounced differently.
But that would reduce the size of the vocabulary from 'good' to
'rather small' for the size of the text. Especially if combined
with all the other cases of 'similar' letters occurring in 
similar locations. 

>     > The appearance of <f> and <p> at top lines of paragraphs only
>     > (virtually), should remind us of the gallows in the letter shown
>     > in Capelli, where these are purely ornamental additions to
>     > existing letters at the top and bottom lines only.
> 
> Surely <k> and <t> are not ornamental; their distribution is too
> consistent for that.

Absolutely.
And this is probably significant. p/f are like k/t in the way their
shapes
distinguish themselves from all the other letters (except q - Currier
4).
At the same time k/t behave normally while p/f don't.
What did the person(s) who made this up have in mind?

>     > Do we get valid Voynich words if the f's and p's are simply
>     > removed?
> 
> Good question.
> 
> Here is a tentative answer. 
> Below are the words with <p>/<f> gallows,
> where both variants together have at least 5 occurrences in the book,
> for which omitting the gallows produces a word with less than 5
> occurrences. 

All these can be written with k/t instead of p/f !!

> And here are those where the <p> and <f> variants occur
> at least 5 times, and the gallows-less variant occurs
> more than 10 times:

A much longer list. Again, most of the time k/t are valid replacements
of p/f, except (or less frequently) when 'l' precedes the gallows.

> It seems that the <p> and <f> gallows are deletable when they
> occur at the beginning of the word (with or without
> platform.

Likely to be paragraph-starters...

> On the other hand, the instances that cannot be
> deleted are generally preceded by <o> or <qo>.

> On the other hand, here are some common <t>/<k> words where the
> gallows apparently can be omitted:

Another very long list. A special family of these is formed by the
platform or pedestalled gallows: (ckh, cth, cfh, cph) => ch.

> Of course, the fact that a given letter can be removed
> from many words does not mean that it is superflous. (Consider
> final "s" or "y" in English, 

What it all means in Voynichese is an open question. I would not
expect that letters that can be removed are superfluous. But this
is not a typical feature for any language I know (except for
some obvious cases at word endings as above).

>     > On a more frivolous note, having recently been to Prague I find
>     > it irresistable not to learn a bit more about the Czech language.
>     > (I can already say: "do not enter or leave the train, the doors
>     > are about to close") :-)
> 
> Let me see, I bet it it sounds something like
> "U concete prosím u vístup a nástup ..."  8-)

Close!
If this is from memory, I am impressed.
The initial 'u' is actually attached to the word concete.
This word is the verb 'stop', where the initial 'u' is attached as
a regular verb mode modifier (but don't ask me how regular). Other
such prefixes exist (na-, ne-). Intrigues me...

The bit that struck me most about Czech (but I know too little)
is that the consonants can be split up into 'hard' and 'soft' ones,
and this has some semi-regular consequences for orthograhy.
Also, there are certain fixed consonant change patterns included in
various grammatical rules. 
I know that this is too vague to make any sense, but I'll explain 
when I understand it better.

>     > To the point. Czech has a number of orthographic rules which remind
>     > me a bit of some of the observations made by Stolfi (no 'e' after
>     > 'f' or 'p').
> 
> Unfortunately many other languages have these rules, too.
> (Even... you know which one. 8-)

I Am Not A Liguist, as the saying goes, but I've browsed books dealing
with a variety of languages. Czech is the first major European language
which I've seen behave in suspicious ways, from a Voynich point of view.
Another 'suspicious language', for a very different reason, is Arabic
(I guess that could have been formulated more precisely....).

Cheers, Rene