Latin Contractions

My efforts to get a copy of The Curse of the Voynich are themselves apparently cursed. The first time I tried to order this book I was at a vacation rental for a month, and discovered that the postal service would not deliver it because the rental had no mailbox. The second time my order was canceled because the book was out of stock. I am hopeful that my third effort will meet with a better outcome.

While I wait for it to arrive, however, I've been looking at one of Nick Pelling's ideas. Did the Voynich cipher employ contraction and abbreviation as part of its process? If so, it seems like this could explain the relatively low amount of information conveyed by Voynichese words. It would be a lossy compression process similar to the removal of vowels, but perhaps more culturally appropriate to the 15th century.

I looked at the 1901 German translation of Adriano Cappelli's Lexicon abbreviaturarum, and it seems that conventions for contraction and abbreviation evolved over time such that by the 14th or 15th centuries scribes were using a number of methods in conjunction, including the use of a small set of symbols borrowed from Tironian notes. In order to understand these processes better, I took thirty random entries from the lexicon and looked at what the scribes chose to keep from the full written word and what they felt they were able to do away with. In general, I found that words could be divided into three parts:

Prefix: The prefix is made of consecutive letters from the start of the word, including at minimum the first letter. In my samples, the prefix is one character long about 53% of the time, two characters about 23% of the time, three characters about 6% of the time.

Infix: The infix is made of of letters that are generally not consecutive, chosen from the middle of the word. Presumably these are letters that differentiate between one contracted word and another. There is roughly 12% chance that a given letter from the middle of the word will appear in the infix.

Suffix: The suffix is made of consecutive letters from the end of the word, except the -m of accusative endings, which is sometimes dropped. The last letter was included in the suffix about 63% of the time, the second-to-last about 30% of the time, the third-to-last about 6% of the time.

What is interesting about this, to me, is that the first letter of each word is always retained. That means, if the Voynich cipher employs abbreviations and/or contractions, and the subsequent steps are only forms of substitution (and not, for example, transposition), then it might be possible to crack the first letters of Voynichese words.

It would be hard to know if you had gotten it right, though!