The Voynich Ninja

There's a lot going on on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . The bottom marginalia with the lying figure (mus del). A column of words seemingly added in the margin. But in between these words and the main text there's another row of what looks like single glyphs. I've cut the ribbon for easier viewing:

[attachment=2311]

This row includes mostly single EVA glyphs, but also two [sh] and an [air] cluster.

Now for the sake of argument, let's assume two things (which are definitely not certain):

1) This was written by someone "in the know", not some would-be decipherer.
2) They are indeed considered single glyphs

...then this means we should alter the input of our statistical experiments. Things like air and sh should be transcribed as single characters.

At least that would be the case if those two conditions were certainly met. Has this ever been studied?

In the second case, this is not "sh"! If the left leg is EVA-I, then the assumption of the independent meaning of all these glyphs is doubtful.

The idea of air as single character has been suggested a couple of years ago by lelle.

I also agree with Wladimir that this is not sh.

But I think that this "single-glyph" interpretation lacks substantiation. What's quite probable is that the objects signified by these items are homogenous, but that does not mean that they would be represented by single glyphs. For example, natural numbers are homogenous, but that does not mean that a natural number is necessarily written as a single digit. Some of them are, but beginning with number 10, they are not.

Well yes, but that would mean air is a digraph (or trigraph if you will). This still implies that it should be transcribed as one character for statistical analysis.

I'm working on a argument for parsing the script which uses exactly this evidence (there are several "single glyph sequences" throughout the text). It's not groundbreaking, but it does put parsing on a firm basis and shows which glyphs are problematic.

(19-08-2018, 07:50 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well yes, but that would mean air is a digraph (or trigraph if you will). This still implies that it should be transcribed as one character for statistical analysis.

No it does not. If you encounter a standalone sequence "385" in a text, that does not mean that "385" should be transcribed as one character.

But if Voynichese introduces apparent digraphs compared to other languages, it will mess up your entropy values and other stats.