Re: qokeey (Transition between languages A and B)

["Philip Neal" <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> No, this is about the stars or 'recipes' section,
> ff. 102 - 113 or thereabouts (this is from memory).
> First I thought there are two dialects, but one
> main difference between about half the pages and
> the other half is the occurrence of the 'word'
> qokeey which is either very frequent or non-existent.

You are right, aren't you? The pattern is statistically highly significant.
I attach a file analysing the distribution of qokeey in the paragraphs of 
folios 103r-116r like this:

page	lines	paragraphs
103r	54	11011 00040 12211 344

This means that 103r has 54 lines and 18 paragraphs, and that qokeey
occurs once in the first paragraph, once in the second, not at all in
the third etc. There is a rough symmetry between folios on the same
sheet of the quire, but this is hard to quantify.

I would describe the pattern in terms of three distributions:

If a paragraph contains the word qokeey, there is a 38% chance that
the next paragraph will contain the word qokeey.
If a paragraph contains the word qokeey, there is a 40% chance that
qokeey occurs more than once.
If the current word is qokeey, there is a 6% chance that the next
word will be qokeey.

The first two distributions are indicative of a word with a
highly specific content such as a proper name: i.e. a biblical
concordance would show that King David is not mentioned in some
books, while in others he is the subject of whole chapters and
mentioned several times in a verse.

The third distribution is not characteristic of names, is very
characteristic of all the high frequency Voynich words, and is
strong evidence for Currier's view that the words are not
words at all.

I think I will note this on my web site with acknowledgements.

Philip Neal









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page	lines	paragraphs		page	lines	paragraphs

103r	54	11011 00040 12211 344
103v	44	40010 00311 1000	116r	30	00201 240

104r	45	00000 00000 001		115v	45	01000 00000 000
104v	44	00000 20010 011		115r	44	00000 00010 000

105r	35	21000 00000 000		114v	41	00000 00000 0
105v	38	00000 00000		114r	45	00000 00000 00

106r	47	00000 01000 00000	113v	49	01000 00010 00001
106v	47	00000 00010 01200	113r	51	00100 10000 00000 2

107r	51	00100 00000 00000 0	112v	47	10021 01000 000
107v	49	01020 00010 00134	112r	45	35011 01001

108r	50	02001 00100 01030 1	111v	51	40103 10
108v	51	01032 100(14)		111r	54	2(13)311 1

109r	missing				110v	missing
109v	missing				110r	missing

The 'lines' column lists how many lines there are on the page.
The 'paragraphs' column lists the occurrences of 'qokeey' in each paragraph
of the page. I.e. 111v has 51 lines, the first paragraph contains 4 
occurrences
of 'qokeey', the second paragraph none, the third paragraph 1 etc.

Figures for 116r refer only to the stars section, which ends halfway down 
this
page.

'(14)' and '(13)' in the figures for 108v and 111r refer to paragraphs with
14 and 13 occurrences of 'qokeey'.