VMs: Has anyone been down this route before?

["Brian Tawney" <btawney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Somewhere I saw a graph that implied that there were some kinds of
similarities between Qur'anic Arabic without vowels and the VM.  I did a
little analysis on my own and came up with some interesting stuff, but I was
wondering if anyone had gone down this route already.

In the Qur'an, if you take out all of the vowels and other marks (like
shadda and sukun), the most common pair of letters is ['l] (alif-lam).  This
stands to reason because this is the Arabic word 'the'.  This pair of
letters accounts for 5.27% of the text of the Qur'an.

In the VM the most common pair of letters is /ch/.  This pair accounts for
5.74% of the text of the VM.  In addition, /ch/, like ['l], is a very common
prefix.

So...suppose ['l] -> /ch/.  Just about any Arabic text mentions Allah,
['llh], so you would expect /chh?/ somewhere in the manuscript.  The only
word that matches this pattern, however, is /chhy/, and it only occurs once.
On the other hand, from a Muslim point of view this is not a very pious text
anyway because it contains not only images, but images of naked women.  If
it were a pagan text it might use the word 'god' in the generic sense,
['lh].  You would expect, in that case, to find /chy/, which you do 136
times.

Still, if [y] => [h], then this would make sense too because Arabic [-h] is
a common ending for feminine nouns, and Voynichese /-y/ is also a common
ending.

I can see some shortcomings with this already (like the word for 'no' would
by /hc/, which doesn't occur)...but I'm wondering if this route had already
been looked into.

Brian Tawney



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