The Voynich Ninja

If the text in the VMS is related to the pictures therein contained (which is not definite but quite reasonable), then it is reasonable to expect certain repetitive narration structure of the underlay message throughout the homogenous folios (such as plant folios).

In other words, when describing plants, the scribe would likely have followed more or less constant pattern, such as (just for example) "this plant is called
XXX, it is associated with such and such days, stones, stars, angels etc., it is useful in such & such cases, it is to be used in such & such form etc."

Provided that there is the narration structure, synthetic language will preserve it in its written form (natural language, obviously, will do that too, but I rule it out offhand for other reasons). On the other hand, cipher may preserve it, but not necessarily will. For example, a simple substitution cipher (which, btw, the VMS is definitely not) does only change individual letters through a pre-defined rule and does not change the order of words. Hence, the narration structure is preserved. A cipher involving interleaving of text blocks (words, lines etc.) will destroy the narration structure, and it becomes not traceable in the overlay.

So whether we observe or do not observe the narration structure in the overlay may serve as a (conditional) tiebreaker between cipher and synthetic language: namely, if the narration structure is not observed, then a cipher is most certainly in place.

The question is ready - what do we do to "observe" the narration structure? Actually that is the question that I was about to ask - does anyone know any computational methods of revealing narration patterns in unknown texts?

In my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I utilized most basic and rough approach - namely, I followed the location of occurrences of "Voynich stars" (f68r1 and f68r2) labels within botanical folios - whether their position in the folio exhibits any patterns or not. No definite evidence towards the narration structure was collected. The only positive result was that in multi-paragraph folios, the first star occurrence tends to be in earlier paragraphs while the subsequent star occurrences (if they do exist) tend to be in the last paragraph. However, folios with only one star occurrence do not support this picture - the star is very often mentioned in the last paragraph.

(26-01-2016, 12:21 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The question is ready - what do we do to "observe" the narration structure? Actually that is the question that I was about to ask - does anyone know any computational methods of revealing narration patterns in unknown texts?

I expect that it will be difficult to do this without a tentative classification of the words in the text, but it's worth looking.

As you mentioned, a synthetic language would likely preserve grammatical features of the author's language, much more so than a cipher.

One possible avenue is to start by determining where the information bits are, and how they're distributed throughout the page.

Assuming that the synthetic language's encoding mechanism is consistent (i.e. words are always encoded in the same way), the distribution of keywords should be comparable to that of a plaintext.

I would think a basic grammar, a few nouns and a few verbs would be the minimum to look for signs of narrative structure.  You would provably want to start by looking for labels on images that are repeated frequently in the text.  Then look at the words in the text before and after the label words and see if there's any association with them and any words you can identify as noun candidates.  Refine as necessarily. 

The verbs don't need to be that close to the nouns so it's really needles and haystacks without some vocabulary.  And there may not be any needles.  Just because you have natural language doesn't guarantee you have narrative too.  Rather than a plant image having directions or a cute story attached it might be nothing but a list of nouns.

For example (red earth) (wet earth) (shady place) (June night) (purgative) (vermifuge) (poison) (poison) (long stem) (thick root) (new bloom) (proper name of angel) (proper name of second angel) (stomach) (liver) (blood)

I think Stephen Bax is on the right track in trying to find meanings for labels as a starting point.  I don't think there is compelling evidence he has found any yet, but I do agree he's looking in the right place.  I think you're probably going to have to do the same too before asking if there is narrative structure in VMS.

(02-02-2016, 08:24 AM)crezac Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

I think Stephen Bax is on the right track in trying to find meanings for labels as a starting point.  I don't think there is compelling evidence he has found any yet, but I do agree he's looking in the right place.  I think you're probably going to have to do the same too before asking if there is narrative structure in VMS.

It's possible the labels aren't labels. They might be a stream of text broken up. They might be fragments. They might be heavily abbreviated.

If you look at very old apothecary jars from eastern Europe, for example, they were so heavily abbreviated that only someone who already had an intimate knowledge of the contents (and could see and sniff them) could readily read them.

And, as I mentioned in another post, a label isn't necessarily the name of the item, it may be what it's for, the color, what it comes from, what it signifies, or a term to categorize it.



Take Bax's label for Taurus, for example. The assumption is that the seven stars are Pleiades.

It's certainly possible, Pleiades has been known as the Seven Sisters for a very long time and is readily identifiable in the sky. But it's also possible that the symbol in the center of the wheel is the sun or the earth, and the line running from it to the seven "stars" means they are connected and the seven stars represent Venus, Mercury, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn (the standard celestial line-up at the time) and that the seventh one, connected to the center, could be either the sun or the earth. There are also other constellations that consist of seven major stars.

So however those "labels" are read, because they are so short, several alternative interpretations are possible for almost any of them and not knowing which language (if any) underlies the glyphs multiplies the possibilities.

(02-02-2016, 09:59 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(02-02-2016, 08:24 AM)crezac Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

I think Stephen Bax is on the right track in trying to find meanings for labels as a starting point.  I don't think there is compelling evidence he has found any yet, but I do agree he's looking in the right place.  I think you're probably going to have to do the same too before asking if there is narrative structure in VMS.

It's possible the labels aren't labels. They might be a stream of text broken up. They might be fragments. They might be heavily abbreviated.

If you look at very old apothecary jars from eastern Europe, for example, they were so heavily abbreviated that only someone who already had an intimate knowledge of the contents (and could see and sniff them) could readily read them.

And, as I mentioned in another post, a label isn't necessarily the name of the item, it may be what it's for, the color, what it comes from, what it signifies, or a term to categorize it.



Take Bax's label for Taurus, for example. The assumption is that the seven stars are Pleiades.

It's certainly possible, Pleiades has been known as the Seven Sisters for a very long time and is readily identifiable in the sky. But it's also possible that the symbol in the center of the wheel is the sun or the earth, and the line running from it to the seven "stars" means they are connected and the seven stars represent Venus, Mercury, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn (the standard celestial line-up at the time) and that the seventh one, connected to the center, could be either the sun or the earth. There are also other constellations that consist of seven major stars.

So however those "labels" are read, because they are so short, several alternative interpretations are possible for almost any of them and not knowing which language (if any) underlies the glyphs multiplies the possibilities.

All that said if you want to do any real analysis you have to start somewhere.   Bayes' rule is better than nothing.  And while I agreed with Bax that starting with what appear to be labels was the most reasonable starting point I didn't say he picked the right labels to start with.   If it were Taurus that's a constellation, not a star.  And if it's a known star there's no reason to assume the label is a name for the star (Aldebaran?).  I need to check a few facts, but if you want to start a new thread we could discuss this there rather than hijack Anton's.

There's a bit of history behind this...

The tentative reading of (Eva) doary or doaro as Taurus is a very old one. Unfortunately, I can't trace back who first suggested it (wasn't me). Stephen used it as part of his theory.

In general, one should not expect to find many Latin (or Greek) words by simple substitution of readings from the MS. However, there are words that don't follow the word structure, so one could hypothesise that such words could be some phonetic rendering of a common name, while the rest of the text follows 'some as yet unknown system'.

doary doesn't really follow the structure, so it could be.... It's as good a hypothesis as many others.

(26-01-2016, 12:21 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Provided that there is the narration structure, synthetic language will preserve it in its written form (natural language, obviously, will do that too, but I rule it out offhand for other reasons). On the other hand, cipher may preserve it, but not necessarily will. For example, a simple substitution cipher (which, btw, the VMS is definitely not) does only change individual letters through a pre-defined rule and does not change the order of words. Hence, the narration structure is preserved. 

Hello Anton, I agree with most of what you write, but I could not follow the passage above. How can you say that the Voynich ms definitely is not a simple substitution cipher? I don't think it is a cipher, but since we understand so little of the manuscript, I try to keep an open mind and I try to exclude as little as necessary as definitely impossible. I would like to better understand you views on this specific point.

The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. dates to the same time as the Voynich manuscript: it is a simple substitution cipher using an ad-hoc alphabet. I think that the Voynich manuscript could be a similar cipher, in which the original language was not something trivial as Latin or Arabic, but some weird language that has not been identified yet. Again, this is not my preferred hypothesis, but it does not seem impossible to me.

Hi all, thx for your responses. I'm sorry to say that I am dramatically busy at the moment and I can't afford to spend much time in the forum.

I'd like to clarify that under the "narration structure" I meant not the low-level grammar structure - such as formation of sentences, - but rather a high-level structure, where each page from a homogenous set of folios would (as we might reasonably expect) demonstrate more or less similar sequence of "descriptive blocks" relating to certain topics, like (most roughly):

1) this plant is called XXX
2) this plant is associated with such and such days of month
3) this plant is associated with such and such stones

etc.

The topics could be any, but the idea is that they would repeat from folio to folio in (roughly) the same sequence.

It's definitely a good idea to start with labels (in fact, that's exactly what I did in my article), but my question refers rather to scientific algorithms that are out there (if any). What I personally did was just what first came to my mind - I introduced line- and paragraph-coordinates for the vords in a page and traced those coordinates for f68r1 and f68r2 labels across the botanical folios. Then I built coordinate hystograms to see if there is any pattern (and I did not find many a pattern).

-Job-:

Nice to see you in the forum. There is a very good idea at the VQP of a query that plots labels; unfortunately, it is not perfect, because I guess not all supposed labels there are really labels. It would be great if this query's adequacy could be improved and, furthermore, if one could plot "thematical" labels selectively (or if they could just be colour-marked).

Marco:

Simple substitution cipher stats and patterns would be the same as for a natural language. Since the VMS is highly unlikely to be a natural language, it is not a simple substitution cipher neither.

(02-02-2016, 04:27 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Nice to see you in the forum. There is a very good idea at the VQP of a query that plots labels; unfortunately, it is not perfect, because I guess not all supposed labels there are really labels. It would be great if this query's adequacy could be improved and, furthermore, if one could plot "thematical" labels selectively (or if they could just be colour-marked).

I will be adding a feature to generate custom overlays at some point.

As a temporary solution, i've generated overlays which highlight the labels in each folio:
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(02-02-2016, 04:27 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... a homogenous set of folios would (as we might reasonably expect) demonstrate more or less similar sequence of "descriptive blocks" relating to certain topics, like (most roughly):

1) this plant is called XXX
2) this plant is associated with such and such days of month
3) this plant is associated with such and such stones

etc.

An important point. But let me digress a bit first. In the 1990's the herbalist Sergio Toresella likened the the Voynich MS herbal illustrations with those of the alchemical herbals. Now other herbalists do not agree, but it certainly led me, at the time, to look at these MSs more closely. This page of Philip Neal gives a good intoduction:
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The same 98 herbs appear in each of the MSs, and they are copied quite consistently. They're interesting, as they are partly imaginary (or at least barely recognisable) herbs, as Marco already indicated. Furthermore, their illustrations are worse, esp. more simplistic, than those in the Voynich MS.

What is relevant for this topic are the descriptions (or recipes) for each of the herbs. These are usually in Latin or vulgate. The length of these texts is quite comparable with the length of the sections in the Voynich MS herbal part. They also vary in roughly the same way.

However, the one thing that really jumps out is that these texts are full of standard word combinations and short phrases, which is completely lacking in the Voynich MS.

Examples: "ad sanandum" appears in about every second recipe, as does: "accipe folia istius herbe", where folia is sometimes radicem or something else.

This is a real problem.