Re: VMs: Q: Theories about "4o" at word beginning?

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Elmar,

At 12:40 20/12/2003 +0100, Elmar Vogt wrote:
> Just another question from the neophyte:

...who is actually Ld. Agilmar von Sevelingen, Shire of Turmstadt, Regional 
Deputy Fencing Marshal for the Heartlands (within the SCA, that is): but 
otherwise a 37-year-old software developer working in Nürnberg with a 
healthy interest in that mickey-take Lingua Franca "Europanto" - welcome, 
I'm sure you'll feel right at home here! :-)

> Are there theories why the "4o" sequence seemingly appears only at word/group
> beginnings?

Basically (in EVA), what does <qo> denote & why does it only really appear 
at the start of words? As with all things Voynichese, there are *many* 
possible theories and explanations (probably >= (number_of_listmembers) to 
the power 1.5). Here are some of my favourites, but try not to inhale them 
all too deeply:-   :-)

(1) It means "the rest of this word is actually a number". Most relevant to 
theories of the VMs that revolve around the VMs' being based on a cleverly 
disguised number system (where it would need a special escape token to 
indicate that a word is a number rather than a code index).

(2) It is always preceded by a space because it makes the code output looks 
nice (but has actually nothing to do with where the *real* word-endings are 
in the plaintext). This often arises when people try to explain anomalous 
word-length statistics (specifically, why they seems to have a 
non-language-like distribution) in terms of fake spaces. While I don't know 
of any ciphers from the period which deliberately remove all spaces before 
systematically inserting new ones, that doesn't mean that none such exists. 
The statistical distribution might actually be quite typical of 
abbreviatory shorthands of the period (such as Radcliff's), but as we don't 
currently have any good examples of these in use, it's hard to tell. :-(

(3) It stands in for "qu", and that's that. Certainly, some medieval 
renderings of "q" look a lot like "4" (for example, the Llull scans as 
linked to on-list a few days ago). However, this looks a bit unnecessary 
for an artificial language (why reinvent Latin?) & a bit too obvious for a 
cipher... so who knows? :-|

(4) There's some kind of built-in ambiguity to the polyalphabetic cipher 
system by which we can arrange (by careful choice) for "q" to almost always 
be followed by "o" (as proposed by Leonell Strong). Well... I don't 
personally buy this, but some others do... so YMMV. :-)

(5) The pair <qo> is a verbose cipher proxy for a letter in an underlying 
alphabet. In support of this is the fact that "4o" appears in a couple of 
ciphers from circa 1450 in the famous Milanese cipher ledger, and in 
another cipher from Urbino circa 1440 (quoted in Sacco). But why it should 
only appear at the start of words is another matter entirely.

(6) The pair <qo> might code for some Tironian-notae-style preposition 
(like "cum-" / "con-", or "pre-"), depending on what the source plaintext 
happens to be.

(7) <qo> codes for the start of a kind of artificial word, whereby the 
restricted choice of letters following it (and in the fairly-rigid word 
structure we often observe, such as in the OKOKO model etc) code for 
choices traversing down some kind of tree structure. Fine - but it doesn't 
work for me. :-o

(8) <qo> acts a proxy for some kind of local substitution cipher (ie for a 
small cipher hidden elsewhere on the same page / folio / bifolio / quire / 
whatever). For example, it might mean "use the letter hidden at the start / 
end of the current line".

etc etc :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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