Re: More on label anomalies

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Grove wrote:
 
> p + t = 66.01 %
> k + f = 23.64 %
> 
> 2/3rds of the pages begin with a t/p gallows. Isn't that a little
> staggering?

Not really. Gabriel remarked  how most labels start with <o> but,
once divested of this initial <o>, with <p> or <t> in equal
ratios. This suggests that <o> is a sort of article. Now,
paragraphs start mostly with gallows (<p, t, k, f>). This
in turn suggest that Voynichese sentences do _not_ start
with an article, i.e. do not start with a noun. If this is
a language (or a simple-substitution cipher), that means that
Voynichese is a verb-first language, like Celtic or Polynesian.
The high proportion of <p>s ans <t>s (still higher than in the
labels), and of <k>s and <f>s is easily explained in at least
two ways:

1. verbs are inflected by altering their initial consonant
   (e.g. Balinese _bli_ "to buy" -> _mli_ "buys, bought"

2. verbs are inflected by prefixes, and those prefixes nearly all
   start with <p>, <t>, <k> or <f>.

Once again, nothing really extraordinary, and nothing at all
incompatable with a run-of-the-mill natural language.