VMs: Voynichese = Arabic?

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Recall the recent discovery that vowel-less Arabic ("Qur", the Quran) and 
vowel-less Hebrew ("HbB-D", the Torah) have almost binomial word-length
distributions (WLDs), similar to that of Voynichese:

  http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/misc/wlds/langs-w-lengths-1-smit.png

You have to imagine the horizontal scale of the Hebrew WLD reduced so
that it becomes taller and shifted to the left. The curves are not
quite as symmetric as that of Voynichese: they fall off more slowly on
the long-word side than on the short-word side. Still, the match is 
so close that perhaps we ought to give Arabic a second look.

Arabic and Hebrew had been dismissed many years ago, because
Voynichese "did not show any sign of the three-consonant root scheme"
which was supposed to be characteristic of those languages. According
to cereal-box linguistics, every lexical root of Arabic and Hebrew
consists of three consonants, and words are derived from it by
inserting various vowels before or after these consonants. So, from
the Arabic root "K*T*B" meaning "write" in general, one derives
"kitâb" = book, "kataba" = he wrote, "yaktubu" = he writes, "katîb" =
writer, "kutubî"= book dealer, "kutayyib" booklet, and many more. (See,
e.g., http://wahiduddin.net/words/arabic_glossary.htm ) It was this
simple structure that was looked for in Voynichese, and found lacking.

Reality is a bit more complicated, it seems. To begin with, Arabic
distinguishes "strong" vowels (usually transliterated as "a","y","w"),
which are counted as consonants and written in the script, from "weak"
ones which are usually omitted. Thus, in a fully vowelled edition of
the Quran, the opening sentence (transliterated) would be something 
like

  bîs°mî all»âhî alr»âH°mânî alr»âHîymî

where "H" stands for an Arabic sound ("hah"), "»" means doubling of
the previous consonant, the circumflexes indicate weak vowels, and "°"
means "there is no weak vowel here". (The "»", "°", and weak vowels
would be written as small superscripts or subscripts on the preceding
Arabic letter.) In a plain, vowel-less edition (and in the file "Qur" used
for the plot above), that sentence is written as

  bsm allh alrHmn alrHym

Now, the derivatives from a word may be formed by inserting strong
vowels, which of course will appear in the script. Moreover, the
derivatives from a root can be formed by adding consonants as well as
vowels, e.g. "maktûb" letter, "istiktâb" dictation, etc. Then there
are prefixes like "al-" (strong "a", means "the") and "wa-" (strong "w"
and "a", means "and") -- which are usually attached to the word, but
may be written separately. Then there are the quirks of pronunciation
(whereby you write "alrHym" but say "arraHym"...) -- and much more
that I can't tell you because I am blissfully unaware of.

So we could speculate that 

  EVA "ol" may be the article "al-" 
  
  EVA "qo" may be the prefix "wa-"
  
Anyone dares to carry on? 8-)

AFAIK, most of this also holds for other Afroasiatic (Hamitic/Semitic)
languages like Hebrew, Ancient Egyptian, Geez, etc.

All the best,

--stolfi
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