The Voynich Ninja

I decided to test the statement

Quote:f and p appear predominantly in the first lines of paragraphs

I define a paragraph as a purely visual item - when in right justified text one line ends before its predecessor. Therefore, I count apart those occurrences when the word appears as a label or in a circular band of text, as paragraphs by definition cannot exist there.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. finds f appearing 499 times. I list below the occurrences :
where f does not appear in the first line of a paragraph/ total number of occurrences. Entries marked * are either circular bands of text, entries marked ** are labels and only the total count is included for those pages:
Conclusions:
Out of 499 total ocurrences, glyph f does not appear in the first line of a paragraph in 63 ocurrences (12.6% of all ocurrences).
The glyph appears in circular text or labels in 61 ocurrences. Out of the reminder paragraph text (438 ocurrences) then the glyph does not appear in the first line 14.4 % of the time.
In summary, when glyph f is present in a paragraph block, it will appear in the first line 85.6% of the time.

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Voynichese.com finds p appearing 1620 times. This is too many to count by hand so I took a sample of Currier A and Currier B pages (listed below) and extrapolated for each.
I list below the occurrences:

where p does not appear in the first line of a paragraph/ total number of occurrences.

Out of 169 occurrences, p is not initial-line present in 32 occurrences (18.9% of the time). Although circular text and labels may skew this result, a visual examination of the Voynichese.com You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.suggests that p is not heavily present on those folios and therefore no further weighting was carried out.
Conclusion: p is line-initial 81% of the time.

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Hi David,
I find your observation clearly presented and extremely interesting.

I have joined the searches on voyinichese.com highlighting f in green and p in yellow.
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The case of f is particularly fascinating, since the character does not often occur in the first word of a line. So this not so much a case of LAAFU as of PAAFU (paragraph as a functional unit).

Some random speculation prompted by the facts you collected:

The phenomenon might point to semantic structure in paragraphs, which in some respect is to be expected much more than structure in lines. Ancient herbals (and modern herbals as well) often have a fixed structure. For instance, each paragraph might provide the description of a plant including in a fixed order:

• a listing of different names for the plant
  
• a quantitative evaluation of its Galenic properties (e.g. "dry in the second degree")
  
• recipes for  various diseases
  
• a description of the plant's habitat
  

A possible hypothesis is that the paragraphs begin with listings of plant names in different languages (as in Pseudo-Apuleius). While p and f might not properly apply to Voynichese, they are used for words borrowed from other languages.
Another possibility is that the two glyphs are only used for numbers. The first part of each paragraph contains quantitative data, e.g. the above mentioned Galenic properties (as in the Liber de Gradibus Simplicium or Cadamosto's herbal) or the size of the plant and its parts.

Indeed Marco and Jkp. I think that a visual look at the layout of these glyphs tends to make you think that they can't be letters, but must instead by a sense marker of some sort - a pilcrow or system of per cola et commata.

(09-03-2017, 06:24 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Indeed Marco and Jkp. I think that a visual look at the layout of these glyphs tends to make you think that they can't be letters, but must instead by a sense marker of some sort - a pilcrow or system of per cola et commata.

Thank you for mentioning "per cola et commata" - an expression I hadn't read before.
As I wrote, I don't think that the observed phenomenon necessarily points to the glyphs not being letters: they could be special letters that (due to the systematic organization of the paragraphs) tend to appear in specific positions. I find it harder to think of pilcrows clustering in this way than of some special characters possibly connected with "foreign" languages.

I will try too look for something similar in actual texts: the clustering of any kind of graphic symbol in specific paragraph positions.

(09-03-2017, 06:24 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Indeed Marco and Jkp. I think that a visual look at the layout of these glyphs tends to make you think that they can't be letters, but must instead by a sense marker of some sort - a pilcrow or system of per cola et commata.

Hi all!
As you know, my interpretations of the characters: k, t, p, f are:
k, p - c, g, q
t, f - p, b, m
Maybe, I'm mistaken about their exact meaning, but I strongly believe that they can be C and P in the sense of markers (paragraph, capitulum). Of course, it doesn't mean that all k's, p's, t's and f's are markers in the text. I think that only a part of these characters represents markers of a paragraph or/and a chapter. I'm sure, you payed attention that many of these characters in initial words of lines or paragraphs have some differences in shape from the same ones in the text, in particular, in the center of a word, excluding some rare questionable examples. These differences: stretched top of F and P (sometimes decorated), long K and T.  In the same time, k, t, p, f in initial words which have usual shape could be just first letters (C, P) of those words.
In addition, I support the idea that not all visual paragraphs are really paragraphs.

As you say, the idea that these are sense markers would give reason to the decorations - it was a natural feature to add embellishment to such markers, either for decorative reasons or just to break up the boredom of the scribe.

Searcher, that sounds fine at first sight, but it would mean that, ignoring paragraph markers and labels, P only occurs 63 times in the entire core text.

I could understand this if it represents a foreign sound or glyph, like Marco suggests, but with these statistics in mind it is not possible to map this gallow to a normal sound in a one-to-one substitution.

One could still argue that labels use their own system, which is something I consider, but that doesn't solve the problem for the main text.

(09-03-2017, 11:45 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Searcher, that sounds fine at first sight, but it would mean that, ignoring paragraph markers and labels, P only occurs 63 times in the entire core text.

I could understand this if it represents a foreign sound or glyph, like Marco suggests, but with these statistics in mind it is not possible to map this gallow to a normal sound in a one-to-one substitution.

Yes, in this case I defend my theory that

Quote:k, p - c, g, q
t, f - p, b, m

but it must not necessary be quite this solution, it can be another pairs: k and f, t and p, or k and t, p and f, which may mean the same marker. I work with my own theory, but this and the other mentioned possibilities must be checked.

[Is this the right thread for this post?]

Here are some statistics about gallows and parag head/body lines. I suppose that 65'534 people already computed and posted them, but maybe they will be new to some.

Let "puff" mean a one-leg gallows (p or f), and "tike" mean a two-leg one (t or k)

I took the parags text in each section ("hea", "heb", "cos", "zod", etc.), and split the lines into "head" (the first line) and "body" (all the other lines).

For each of these sets of lines I computed:

• nl = count lines in the set.
  
• nlp = count of those lines that contain puffs
  
• %lp = percentage of nlp relative to nl
  
• nlt =  count of lines that contain tikes
  
• %lt = percentage of nlt relative to nl.
  

• nc = total count of EVA characters [a-z] in that set
  
• ncp = count of puffs among those chars
  
• %cp = percentage of ncp relative to nc
  
• nct = count of tikes among those chars
  
• %ct = percentage of nct relative to nc
  

• %cg = percentage of ncp+nct (total gallows) relative to nc.
  

Here are the results:

                                        body                             
       -------------------------------------------------------------------
  sec      nl   nlp  %lp    nlt  %lt      nc    ncp  %cp    nct  %ct   %cg
  ---  -----  ----- ----  ----- ----   -----  ----- ----  ----- ----  ----
  hea    1042    78  7.5    991 95.0   31256     99  0.3   2972  9.5   9.8
  heb     322    58 18.0    320 99.3   14201     92  0.6   1548 10.9  11.5
  bio     700    90 12.8    679 96.9   29464    144  0.5   2797  9.5  10.0
  str     751    44  5.9    727 96.7   37085     59  0.2   3458  9.3   9.5
  unk     272    61 22.4    267 98.1   13353    114  0.9   1297  9.7  10.6
  pha     190    15  7.9    188 98.8    9520     35  0.4    792  8.3   8.7
  cos     129    17 13.2    101 78.2    3758     19  0.5    320  8.5   9.0

                                        head                             
       -------------------------------------------------------------------
  sec     nl    nlp  %lp    nlt  %lt      nc    ncp  %cp    nct  %ct   %cg
  ---  -----  ----- ----  ----- ----   -----  ----- ----  ----- ----  ----
  hea    167    129 77.2   153 91.5     6307    289  4.6    391  6.2  10.8
  heb     51     47 92.0    49 96.0     2577    143  5.5    158  6.1  11.7
  bio     40     32 79.9    40 99.9     1757     73  4.2    160  9.1  13.2
  str    331    258 77.9   331 99.9    19671    621  3.2   1816  9.2  12.4
  cos     45     24 53.3    38 84.3     1357     37  2.7     98  7.2   9.9
  pha     33     27 81.7    32 96.8     1850     62  3.3    127  6.9  10.2
  unk     33     32 96.8    30 90.8     1726    112  6.5     91  5.3  11.7

Some things worth noting, considering the major sections ("hea", "heb", "bio", "str"):

• Less than 20% of body lines have puffs, whereas more than 77% of head lines have them.  Therefore puffs are not exclusive to head lines, but are much more common in them.
  
• The percentage of puffs relative to all EVA chars (%cp) is ~3.5% higher on head lines than on body lines, while the percentage of tikes (%ct) is ~3.0% lower.
  

If we assume that the tikes have phonetic value, and that the sounds they represent have the same frequencies in both sets (an assumption that is weakly supported by the similar %ct across sections), the last observation could be explained by assuming that most of the puffs on head lines are embellished versions of the tikes (or of tikes combined with other glyphs, like te or ke), while a few puffs are substituting for other characters. 

However, word frequencies are probably different on head lines, and thus the frequency of sounds may well be different too. Thus the above conclusion should be taken with a ladle of salt...

All the best, --stolfi