Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 23 [1995 January 12] ----------------------------------------- More Data on Regularities Suggestive of Grammar I'm not sure whether anyone's done this before, and can't find it in the (enormous) mail file, so here it is. I took the entire VMS, A and B together, and counted every instance I could find of what seems the most common regularity. The groups have the form , and the four suffixes are -AJ -AM -AN -AR. In other words, what would be a declension if the Voynich groups were words, if they declined, and if they declined by changing an end inflection. All of which, of course, are big IFs, so I invite alternative explanations for these regularities. These are, I believe, all the prefixes for which we have a complete "declension", ie at least one instance of every form. There are numerous instances of incomplete "declensions". Prefix -AJ -AM -AN -AR ----------------------------------- 2 4 74 30 31 4O8 1 11 2 4 4OF 9 114 155 69 4OP 2 26 22 21 4OPS 1 2 1 3 8 58 509 135 159 8AR 4 2 1 3 8S 1 4 1 4 9F 3 19 7 16 9P 6 16 4 5 O8 4 28 6 7 OE 1 11 8 3 OE8 5 3 1 4 OEF 3 12 24 7 ** anomaly alert OP 14 42 29 43 OR 1 14 10 4 P 4 15 5 12 Q 6 2 0 45 ** I broke a rule, for the anomaly R 3 16 9 7 S 14 38 16 33 S8 4 3 4 6 SC 2 2 2 21 ** SCF 1 3 3 4 SO8 1 22 3 3 X 3 4 1 1 ZC8 2 6 1 1 null 18 92 24 73 ----------------------------------- Now, some of these are probably bogus, but the commonly occurring ones show a very regular frequency pattern. If they are not inflections, then perhaps each Voynich group is a syllable, and these endings are the four main vowels? Or perhaps the language is Mandarin, after all, and these endings represent the four tones? Well, numerous fanciful hypotheses are possible, but tell me, by what simple rules could you write gibberish with such a pattern? And what is to be made of 8AJ 8AM 8AN 8AR? Scanning the text, it seems to occur quite often after another word with the same ending, so perhaps it's a possessive, like meus meum mei meo? Further observations: the "prefixes" 2, OE, OR also occur very often as complete groups. Most of the others also occur with -9 as the "suffix", which is another tiny bit of evidence that 9 is either plain A or A with a consonant. Not sure how helpful this is... I did it mostly so as to get my brain back in gear on Voynich. But I guess any hard data are of some use. Robert