Re: VMs: Grove words (was: A very important discovery)

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> The graphs are new, but the explanation for those peaks in the
> line-sorted graph may be a discovery that John Grove made several
> years ago: on many lines, the first word looks like a "normal" word
> with an extra gallows attached at the beginning.
>
> IIRC, the evidence that those initial gallows are not really part of
> the word includes: (1) many of those words are fairly rare, but if one
> removes those "detachable gallows" (as John called them), one often
> obtains a relatively common word. (2) words that start with a gallows
> letter are more common at the beginning of lines than elsewhere; (3)
> those words often have two gallows, which is a fairly rare feature of
> Voynichese words.
>
> About item (3): to be precise, in some trenscription of the VMS there
> are ~930 tokens (in 35,000, or 2.6%) that do not fit my word grammar
> because they violate the three-layer (crust-mantle-core-mantle-crust)
> rule. Most of these words occur only once in the text. Of those ~930
> tokens, ~210 look like Grove words in that they start with a gallows,
> and by removing that gallows one obtains a word that fits my word
> grammar. (Most of the remaining ~720 anomalies could be pairs of words
> that were run together).
>
> I have not checked whether those ~210 "Grove-like" tokens occur at the
> beginning of lines or not. They seem to occur at about the same rate
> in most sections, but twice as often in Biological, and hardly at all
> in Astro/Cosmo. None of them occur as labels.

Out of curiosity, have you tried adding Grove-prefixes to the grammar?

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