Re: Voynich research needs

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jorge Stolfi wrote:
 
> So I kept believing
> in some variant of the Chinese theory---until a few months ago,
> when I happened to run a simple statistical test (suggested by
> Bradley Schaefer).  If we map each Voynichese word to the number of gallows
> that it contains, we get the following text:
> 
>     ?1110110           110000000001       11110001
[snip]
>     0100110110         10100000           011100110
>     1101011001         00100010?          ...
> 
> >From previous analysis, I already knew the sequence would contain
> almost exclusively 1s and 0s; but I was expecting them to be randomly
> interleaved. Instead, the 1s and 0s tend to be clustered in runs of
> same value. Said another way, there is a strong correlation between
> the presence or absence of gallows in adjacent words.
> 
> This unexpected feature of Voynichese throws a monkey wrench into the
> Chinese theory.

No it doesn't. I had noticed that too, just looking at the
transcription,
how there is a sort of "gallows agreement". My explanation (which
I never posted here) was that the gallows had no phonetic value,
but were gender/number markers (feminine singular, feminine plural,
masculine singular, masculine plural). Then you could expect such
a pattern. Now that was only one of several explanations I had
thought of. Voynichese might have as many genders -- noun categories
if you prefer -- as gallows. That could be a real feature of the
language, or an artificial addition if Voynichese is an artificial,
"philosophical" language. It  could be a real language with this
feature, and it could be Chinese with this feature added. Once 
again, we are back to square one.