Re: More on label anomalies

["Dana F. Scott" <dfscott@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Or perhaps <o> is scientific notation to designate a description of
plant stems, roots, or maybe bulbs. We need to keep in mind the subject
of the encrypted text which appears to place a major emphasis on plants,
i.e. Botany. Scientists love scientific notation. Most scientists use
it.

Regards,
Dana Scott

Jacques Guy wrote:

> 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.

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