Re: VMs: Has anyone been down this route before?

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

30/08/2004 5:49:51 PM, "Brian Tawney" <btawney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>In the Qur'an... 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/.

/h/ is always preceded by /c/  with or without intruding
gallows. /c/ is always followed by /h/, again with or 
without intruding gallows. So we can have only:

1. ch
2. c<gallows>h

There are only four gallows.

Arabic rules itself out. Just consider:

bld "town"  'lbld "the town"
mlk "king"  'lmlk "the king"
fls "fils" (one thousandth of a dinar)
klb "dog"   'lklb "the dog"
qlb "heart" 'lqlb "the heart"

Another hypothesis was that /qo/ = the Greek
article "ho". 

Since Google has now discovered the Voynich
archives, you can use it to look for similar
hypotheses. They all led nowhere. Except the
"Chinese theory" which I originally floated as
a joke and which, to my great surprise, has
held out. Just this morning I did a Google
search for it, and learned that I had floated it
on 14 December 1991. Well, I had completed
forgotten, and I was surprised at how old it
was!


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