RE: VMs: Language A/B in quire 7...?

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Philip Neal <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Nick:

> > I've recently been looking at quire 7: while
> > the outermost bifolio (f49+f56) is without a
> > doubt Language A, and the next bifolio in 
> > (f50+f55) is Language B, to my eyes the two 
> > central bifolios (f51+f54, and f52+f53) 
> > look much more like Language B than Language A -
> > but this is at variance with the interlinear
> > etc, where the central two are both marked up 
> > as 'A1'.
> 
> I think you are on to something here. Folios 50 and
> 55 stand out
> as language B because, unlike the rest of the quire,
> they contain
> words ending in edy. 

> But 51 and 53 (which are not the same bifolio)
> stand out for the different reason that they have a
> higher frequency of ody than the other folios: see 
> the attached table. I increasingly
> agree with Rene that the idea of exactly two
> languages is an over-simplification. 

The ending -ody, which by itself is not very
common, is actually rather typical for
language A. Jacques Guy has looked at this in the
past and IIRC there is a Cryptologia article
precisely on this. He compares the difference
-edy vs. -ody with vowel differences between
dialects (of a same language).

The dendrogram on Gabriel's site comes from a 
cluster analysis based on digraph statistics in
a Currier-like transcription alphabet. It is a
bit hard to understand, also due to the page number
encoding. This is done for convenience:
one letter for each quire (A-T counting 1-20)
and inside each quire one letter for the 
page. This numbering (not meant to replace the
official page naming convention) has several minor 
advantages, e.g. that it sorts all pages of the 
MS alphabetically, in the order they appear.
(Otherwise the first page is f100r and the last
one f9v :-)  ).
The pages under discussion here are:
GA, GB (f49, language A)
GC, GD (f50, langauge B)
GE, GF (f51, I still think language A)
GG, GH (f52, ")
GI, GJ (f53, ")
GK, GL (f54, ")
GM, GN (f55, language B)
GO, GP (f56, language A)

Note, that the pharmaceutical pages are in A
language but with a relatively high occurrance of
the character pair -eo- (Eva), e.g. in cheol.
Some herbal A pages are 'more like' this type of
language too. 

Finally, the reason why Currier could be wrong
about the two distinct languages is explained
at the bottom of the page:
http://www.voynich.nu/extra/curabcd.html
(just above: 'Some further statistics') 

Cheers, Rene

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