Labels o and q.

["Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,
As you may remember, somebody (?) noted that there is a  tendency of the labels to start with <o>.
I just had a look at the 676 labels which had no unambiguous first  characters (the total number of labels according to my count - which may not be correct and has not been double checked- is  684).
I also counted the distribution of first characters in tokens (again  those with unambiguous characters) and subtracted the label  counts to obtain a label-less token count.

The distribution (in %)  of 1st characters is as follows:
(sorted descending by the frequency of tokens).

Char    Tokens  Labels
o       21.92   67.01
c       18.22    6.66
q       14.13    0.44
s       11.99    5.92
d        9.59    7.25
a        5.78    2.37
y        4.93    6.80
l        3.67    0.44
k        3.40    1.18
t        2.71    0.89
p        1.45    0.15
r        1.27    0.15
e        0.40    0.74
f        0.32    0.
i        0.07    0.
x        0.05    0.
g        0.04    0.
v        0.03    0.
m        0.03    0.
n        0.01    0.
j        0.01    0.
u        0.00    0.
z        0.00    0.

The two largest differences seem to be the excess of <o> and the  lack of <q> as initial characters.

I remember that it has been suggested before that <o> may be an  article preceding a noun. This could well be the case.

I also remember that <q> has been suggested to act as "and" or  "&" joining from the previous line. The lack of <q> in the labels  (only 3 have them) seems to fit nice with that idea too.

Also <c> appears less than expected; I had a look at the labels  they are all <ch>+something except 2 labels which start 
with <cph>.

I am not sure whether the following means anything, but if we leave  out those labels starting with <o> and <q>, then the distribution  seems to get a bit closer to that of the tokens. Note that by doing  this I ignored 67% of the labels...


char  tokens  Labels
c      28.48   20.45
s      18.75   18.18
d      14.99   22.27
a       9.03    7.27
y       7.71   20.91
l       5.73    1.36
k       5.32    3.64
t       4.23    2.73
p       2.27    0.45
r       1.98    0.45
e       0.63    2.27
...

Still there are too many <y>, too few <l>, etc..
A few cells are empty or <5 items in it to perform a chi-squared  test with confidence... 

What I should have done (and will do later) is to count the labels by  the 2nd letter if they start with <o> or <q>, and look at the result  {i.e do they produce valid voynich words?}  but this brings another  problem as some labels have ambiguous 2nd character.
Anyway I thought that what I found so far would be of interest.
All comments are welcome.

Regards,
Gabriel