I think a rough check of whether characters are interchangeable or not may be done by calculating digram frequency matrices and see if they are in concordance or not. Like, for characters X and Y and any Z, look if XZ is as frequent as YZ (provided, of course, that frequency of Y is normalized to that of X).
voynich.nu is currently down for me, so I'm not able to have a check if this was ever done.
Wauw, everybody is doing the You are not allowed to view links.
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(I also made an EVA translation of the page f57v, it can be viewed here:
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Furthermore, i’ve laid the twirl page
f68r on top of this You are not allowed to view links.
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Perhaps it is time now for a site where all the facts of all pages are shown.
Just to note that your chart does not distinguish j from d, neither does it distinguish e from i with a crossbar.
I do not think that the "p" and "f" - are identical. If this were so, they would have written at random and their number should be roughly equal. Do we get the ratio 1623/503 = 3.2
(30-10-2016, 11:00 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's difficult to know the level of detail at which to analyze these sequences...
- The 11th character has a foot on the inner three rings, but not on the outer one.
- The foot of the Latin "9" abbreviation shape on the 10th character touches the base on the inner three, but not on the outer one.
- The curl on the 12th character doesn't touch the stem on the inner three, but it does on the outer one.
- The leg on the 16th character is curved on the inner three, but not on the outer one.
- The lower left part of the loop of the 3rd character is curved on the inner three, but not on the outer one.
- The right-hand stem of character 17 curves up on the inner three, but down on the outer one.
- The leg of character 14 has no foot on the inner three rings, but has a foot on the outer one.
- There is a foot on the 7th character in rings 2 and 4, but not 1 and 3.
- There is no loop on the end of the tail of character 8 in rings 2 and 4, but there is in rings 1 and 3.
- Character 6 has a straight right leg in rings 2 and 4, but a slight foot in rings 1 and 3.
Of these, I would say the variation in character 8 definitely looks deliberate, though I would say the tail is straight in 1 and 3 and hooked in 2 and 4. (Edit: I just realized that you are counting from bottom to top while I'm counting from top to bottom.)
Now, here's something interesting: character 8 alternates according to the pattern ABAB, but character 9 (the
f/
p) alternates AABB. That means that just by looking at this pair of characters you can know which iteration of the sequence you are in (by whether the pair is AA, BA, AB, or BB).
Characters 3 and 16 both follow the pattern ABBB, and in both cases the A form has a straight left stroke (in
j or
I) and the B form has a curved left stroke (in
d or
c). These characters both tell you whether you are in the first iteration of the sequence or not.
Still no idea what it may mean...
(31-10-2016, 12:35 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just to note that your chart does not distinguish j from d, neither does it distinguish e from i with a crossbar.
(31-10-2016, 05:05 AM)Wladimir D Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do not think that the "p" and "f" - are identical. If this were so, they would have written at random and their number should be roughly equal. Do we get the ratio 1623/503 = 3.2
I agree that
IN GENERAL the F is not the P and the items Anton describes must be transcribed as is.
However, with respect to my sitepage I was searching for similarities between letters, and similarities between the 57v and the other pages.
And in that context I assumed that the author made errors in the letters in 57v, and the sequences should have been exactly the same, and i still do think that.
Another two interesting points that came to me today:
1) The m character is immediately before the p and f. This is important because while p and f are often used at the beginning of paragraphs, m is often at the end of lines. The writer may have seen some kind of symbolic "break" between the eighth and ninth characters.
2) The m character is sometimes seen as linked to r in some way. There are two r characters in the sequence, which are four characters to the left and four to the right of the m. I don't know what this could mean.
(31-10-2016, 06:42 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Another two interesting points that came to me today:
1) The m character is immediately before the p and f. This is important because while p and f are often used at the beginning of paragraphs, m is often at the end of lines. The writer may have seen some kind of symbolic "break" between the eighth and ninth characters.
That seems like a possibility. I wonder if these sequences might more generally relate somehow to the "embellishments" that are added to beginnings and ends of lines, and to initial lines of paragraphs. But the fact that
s is conspicuously absent in these sequences (despite being very common line-initially in some places) might be a point against that theory. Also it would not be clear what to make of the rare characters in the sequence.
Also, I was re-reading the thread and I realized that you had already said much of what I said in my previous post, though I had inadvertently skimmed over your post and thus failed to acknowledge it. It certainly does seem that the variation in the four forms of this sequence is intentional, that each iteration is differentiated by the
m and
p/
f symbols, and that the first iteration is marked as "special" by the straight-stroke
j and
I symbols.
(31-10-2016, 05:05 AM)Wladimir D Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do not think that the "p" and "f" - are identical. If this were so, they would have written at random and their number should be roughly equal. Do we get the ratio 1623/503 = 3.2
Dear Vladimir, I am not sure I agree. Imagine you find someone's journal, and the person writes "you're" 80% of the time and "you are" only 20%. Does this mean the forms are not the same? No, it only means that somebody prefers apostrophes.
In contrast, it is also interesting to note that the sequence of seventeen symbols, starting with EVA 'o', begins with symbols that are structurally much simpler and some can even be identified with symbols from other symbol systems. In fact, there is one symbol in the VMs sequence that can be connected with symbols of similar form in three other sequences from various historical traditions. This is a triple convergence of interpretation on the fifth symbol in the VMs sequence. Each interpretation is supported by the existence of an objective, positional confirmation built into the the sequence. See threads on convergence and meaningless coincidence.
My feeling is that the area of primary investigation should be at the level of patterns made by *using* the symbols in the sequence, not at the level of patterns used to *make* the symbols in the sequence.