The Structure of the Words in the Voynich Manuscript

The pattern of glyphs within words in the Voynich Manuscript shows a high degree of regularity, which I attempt to capture here, in Tables 1-6. Certain prefixes and suffixes appear again and again. The tables below show the number of occurrences of words composed from some common prefixes and suffixes. Altogether, these words occur just under 14,000 times in the manuscript, which contains just over 37,000 words.

Table 1: prefixes without l, suffixes beginning with a

For example, the word qokaiin occurs 262 times.

Table 2: prefixes with l, suffixes beginning with a

Table 3: prefixes without l, suffixes beginning with o

Table 4: prefixes with l, suffixes beginning with o

Table 5: prefixes without l, suffixes usually beginning with e

Table 6: prefixes with l, suffixes usually beginning with e

In each case, the number of occurrences of a word is close to the product of the total number of words, the frequency of the prefix, and the frequency of the suffix. In Table 7, I have computed the products, rounded to the nearest integer, using the data contained in Table 1. This shows that the probability of any suffix appears to be independent of the prefix to which it is concatenated.

Table 7: computed version of Table 1

When this is repeated for Table 2 - Table 6, the root-mean squared difference between actual and computed values is 24.312449. However, as the frequency of a word very much depends on where in the manuscript it appears, it is better to analyse one section at a time when investigating this further.

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