The digraph <ed> (Currier C8)

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene Zandbergen)]

I wrote:

>     > I'm still lacking a good explanation for the occurrence of
>     > the character sequence 'ed' (in Eva) which only starts
>     > appearing little by little in the astro section, to become
>     > regular in the B language part.

and Stolfi responded.

> There is one good argument for "e" as a letter prefix: the cosmo
> diagram on f69r apparently shows the word "dolsedy" split as
> d-o-l-s-ed-y. 

Interesting. I had always looked at these as single letters.
(One of the 7 planet names is dolchs[e|o]dy; that allows for
further speculation, some other time)

> [...] it turns out that almost all occurrences of "ed" in language-B
> material are preceded by one of those letters. My interpretation is
> that the "e" post-modifier, which was relatively rare in language A,
> became much more common in laguage B. The appearance of "ed" digraphs
> is only a conspicuous secondary effect of that change.

Now the statistics show a clear and rather spectacular increase 
in this digraph. These statistics say nothing about the cause.
I am quite open to whether it is e-d which starts appearing or
Xe-d, where X is one of a set. I'm willing to go along with Stolfi's
hypothesis of post-modifiers.
(For reference, see the plot at http://www.voynich.nu/diorder.gif)

A more basic question is: is the new combination something new,
or does it evolve from something else. If it is part of an
evolution, then what is evolving? Such an evolution is possible 
for all scenarios: language, encrypted language, pseudo-language
(glossolalia) and human-created gibberish.
With a lot of imagination, one could imagine the following
evolution (Eva and Currier)

chol   =>   cheol    =>    cheody    =>    chedy
SOE    =>   SCOE     =>    SCO89     =>    SC89

These words do exist in different ratios in different sections
of the MS, but they also exist next to each other in one section,
which probaby means that this is not one word evolving into
different forms...

> Here are the "new" words in each major B section:
> 
> Stars:
> [...]
> Herbal-B:
> [...]
> Biological:
> [...]
>
> Note that most of the "new" words of language B end
> with "{cs|sh|k|t}{e|ee}dy".

Absolutely. Perhaps even more striking is the fact that 
without a single exception, all new words which I did not
quote above end with -y (unless this was a selection
criterium).

> Note also that, besides all those "*edy" words, language B also
> displays frequent new words that have "e" but not "d", such as
> "okeey" and "oteey" in Stars, "cheky" in Herbal-B, and "qokeey" in Bio.
> 
> Also "chey" and "shey", which do occur in herbal-A, are almost twice
> as common in Stars. At the same time, other popular language-A words
> like "chol" and "chor" disappear.

Yes, all these changes occur, and some of them are quite gradual over
the sections for which Currier did not have a transcription available
when he made his A vs. B observation. Note that the introduction
of 'ed' is not instantaneous, but happens in the course of only
a few pages.

> So, if the difference between A and B can be described as a
> spelling change, I would rather say that it was a matter
> of replacing "o" by "e" as a post-modifier for benches
> and gallows.

This could well be true. It is one of the options.
Jacques already described the change from <cho> (and a few
others) to <che> (and a few others) a long time ago. But the
question is the same. The change can be the result of a 
trend which: 
- prefers the insertion of a new character
- prefers the replacement of one character by another
- prefers the deletion of a character 
 
To come back to the above, I doubt that there are as many <chod>
in A as there are <ched> in B.
 
> However, I am afraid that the A/B split cannot be properly described
> by a change in structure or spelling or whatever.  The difference
> seems to be a matter of vocabulary ---
> which may well be due to a change of topic, nothing else.

This is one of several valid explanations, but one which has 
a major consequence. It would mean that Herbal-A and Herbal-B
are not about the same topic, i.e. the text does not belong to
the pictures, etc...

I have various (admittedly weak) arguments why there should be
a correlation between text and pictures, which I'll save for
another post. 

> In language B we see a bunch of "new" and quite popular
> words. Most of them happen to use the "e" modifier, especially
> the "Xedy" or "Xeedy" termination; but this is probably because
> the suffix has some special meaning or grammatical importance.

I'm looking for an explanation of the new digraph, and this
could be one of the causes.

> By the way, I am getting increasinly disenchanted about n-gram based
> analysis. It is like feeding all the Louvre paintings through a food
> processor, room by room, and then trying to reconstruct the hystory of
> art from the resulting piles of colored oatmeal. 

It could work... but wouldn't it be a pity.
Long live electronic text processing :-)
 
> What I am trying to get at is that n-gram statistics are not only a
> blurry shadow of word statistics, but are in fact dominated by a few
> common words or word families. Thus we should be paying more attention
> to whole words...

Well, the statistic stands and lacks an explanation. It is also a very
odd statistic for which I cannot think of a parrallel in any known (to 
me) language. If looking at word statistics can provide the answer, then
this is surely worth pursuing.
The nice part about digraph statistics is a purely opportunistic one.
The sample per page is rather significant, and not too sensitive to
uncertain readings or uncertain spaces. And there is much more 'signal'
than in the single character frequency.

So, to summarise:
yes, there are many new words arising with the digraph 'ed' in them,
in the course of a few pages in the MS (over the zodiac section in
fact).
The question to be answered is what could cause this emergence of 
various words with this one digraph. Spelling is possible. Just
'vocabulary' doesn't explain anything, since it would require that there
is some kind of a rule for the introduction of new words. 
I want to find out what the rule is.

Cheers, Rene