The Voynich Ninja

Yes, but what then is the difference to other constructed scripts? (if we assume what we are lookingt at in the VMs is a constructed script, that is, which is far from certain).

Sorry for being slow, Anton:

>"graphically decomposed to", but also "purposefully composed out of"

Yes that process is reversible. All con scripts are constructed this way. What other way would be imaginable?

> many other possible opportunities.

Look, all invented, made up: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

How many possible opportunities do you see? (not counting colored, rotating, and lovecraftian systems

Maybe the crux is to be found in the beginning:

> a constructed alphabet. In other words, it's not taken from any script existing apriori, but rather invented by the guy(s) behind the Voynich

There is no such thing. It is impossible NOT to make it resemble anything, and why would you try to do so?

> irrespectively of whether it conveys a cipher, an artificial language or even a natural language

Again, there is no such thing. It is either a cipher or a writing system. You could treat an unknown script as a cipher, but at some point you need to decide. The type of underlying language behind the writing system is kind of irrelevant.. just that there is one, always (there is a mix of nomenclatures here, btw.).

Addendum:

>dash, underscore, geometric shapes (circle, square, triangle, star)


These are not primitives. A circle can be constructed by two curves, one mirrored and translated. The others can be contstructed out of rotated & translated lines. Stars can be graphemes as ideograms, for example (you'd marvel on how many different stars your operating system vendor has put in the hidden universal font on your machine).

Quote:Yes that process is reversible. All con scripts are constructed this way. What other way would be imaginable?

I guess you miss my point. Let me illustrate it by means of example. Consider Voynichese c. For the sake of this thread, I argue that this glyph is "invented" (that is, designed and included into the Voynich alphabet) by combining e and dash. The dash being appended as a tail modifier to e yields c. Likewise, dash being prepended to e as a head modifier yields h. And so forth.

We don't know if this is the way the Voynich alphabet was actually derived, but, once again, for the sake of this thread I pre-suppose that it is.

What other way is imaginable, you ask. Consider the Latin alphabet. There are letters "с" and "l". There is also letter "d". Is the letter "d" composed out of letters "c" and "l"? No, it is not. It is a letter on its own. It is just accidental that its shape resembles shapes of letters "c" and "l" combined together. At least, unless there is something that I don't know of in the origins of the Latin alphabet.

Quote:Again, there is no such thing. It is either a cipher or a writing system.

You confuse two things here. A cipher is just a set of rules to obtain ciphertext from the incoming plain text. It is matter of encoding, not the matter of which letters (or other signs) are used to convey the code. One and the same ciphertext can be written down by using symbols of Latin alphabet, of Cyrillic alphabet, whatever. (Just the size of the alphabet needs to be sufficient). Hence I clearly separate the alphabet from the writing which it actually conveys. The writing can be an enciphered text in a known language, a plain text in an unknown language, a plain text in an artificial language, or just even nonsense.

Quote:These are not primitives. A circle can be constructed by two curves, one mirrored and translated.

Whether they are primitives or are not - depends on the designer of the alphabet exclusively, on whether he does treat them as primitives or does not. If he treats them as primitives, this just means that, within his alphabet, they are not decomposed in anything more "primitive" than themselves.

In languages that use Latin conventions, the EVA-d shape often means "s" or "d", but I've often wondered if EVA-d was a ligature or representative of an archaic letter that combines two sounds (similar to ae or th, as are found in a number of languages, and which used to be written as one character) or as a double unit of some other sort (nonlinguistic).

(08-06-2017, 05:22 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That's true, but they can't be both left at the same time.

Interestingly enough, ambidextrous people might better be called ambisinistrous, because at the neurological and embryological (developmental) levels, left-handed and naturally ambidextrous people belong in one category together, with right-handed people in another. One the effects of this is that ambidextrous people often display a lot of the same distinctive writing habits as left-handed people, even when writing with their right hands. And while most ambidextrous people can, with practice, exert the same writing or drawing intention with both hands simultaneously, the ability to write or draw two completely unrelated things with each hand simultaneously is far rarer even than ambidexterity itself. I wouldn't be surprised if many ambidextrous people who've lived since writing was invented have made their living as copyists and scribes, since they could potentially produce copies of a text at twice the rate of almost all colleagues.

So could the VMS have been written by the right hand of an ambidextrous scribe who leaned his glyphs to the left out of habit? Sure. There's a lot there for Occam's Razor to cut off, but it's not at all outside the realm of possibility.

Source: Am a medical doctor who had a great neurology professor in med school. I also did a research report about handedness when I was 13, after breaking my right hand and being forced to learn to write with my left hand for a couple of months. I've always had a huge fascination with the human body and how it works, and that ended up being a very fun rabbit hole to go down. I can dig up some PubMed references if anyone is interested in reading more about this.

(27-08-2017, 04:38 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I see three separate strokes for that EVA-d you posted. I'm seeing EVA c, i, and v superimposed on one another.

This doesn't necessarily mean that d was designed out of a combination of these three strokes or these three letters. I always took large amounts of handwritten notes in school, and when I wrote the wrong letter by mistake, the first think I'd look to do was add an extra stroke or two to make it look more like the letter I intended to write. It's less time and labor intensive, and sometimes more aesthetically pleasing, than crossing out or erasing. This is immediately what I thought of when I saw this, and right after, the oft-repeated "the VMS has no obvious corrections" played in my head. It's possible that, due to constraints of time or materials, doing this type of correction was preferred over a physical deletion of the incorrect character.

Incorrect words, meanwhile, might have been rewritten correctly immediately thereafter, without a strikethrough or any other obvious mark. This would explain the occurrence of very similar words right next to each other in strings of 2 or 3 throughout the MS.

(13-09-2019, 04:28 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(27-08-2017, 04:38 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I see three separate strokes for that EVA-d you posted. I'm seeing EVA c, i, and v superimposed on one another.
...

Did you look at all four of them together? There's no "i" shape in the fourth one and the possible "i" shape in the first three, might just be a fast pull of the pen rather than a separate shape.

I try not to assume too much from a single example, that's why I chose an excerpt where the same thing happens several times. There are four EVA-d shapes here that look like they started with a c shape with the EVA-l added.

I'm not just going on visuals... Look at the composition of the tokens. It's doubtful that there were four mistakes... that EVA-e was there in the first place (and was changed because it was a mistake) because EVA-e almost never occurs in those positions. It would be completely out of character with the structure of VMS text.