The Voynich Ninja

In my opinion, the presence of additional loops (the absence of a loop in the red circle) carries the meaning (not just decoration).
On the gallows of rice 1, 2, 3 in the blue squares are 3 identical monograms.
On 4, 5, 6 in the green squares there are also 3 identical monograms, with one of the loops replaced by an angle.
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Good examples, Wladimir.

Sometimes they look like embellishments, sometimes they look like connected gallows, and sometimes they look like two-gallows-in-one (especially the one on the lower right which looks like two EVA-P shapes combined into one).

(19-12-2018, 05:47 PM)Wladimir D Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In my opinion, the presence of additional loops (the absence of a loop in the red circle) carries the meaning (not just decoration).
....

The loops in the gallows 1,2, and 3 look like (shortened) variants of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for me. Do you think that each of these gallows has a different meaning, depending on the number of loops ?

By the way, a very simple question: Why are most, first letters of a page gallows ?

(23-12-2018, 04:50 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the way, a very simple question: Why are most, first letters of a page gallows ?

Everychapter, every text section in a medieval ms. starts with an initial or a Versalie. The question is: Have the Gallows a special meaning, are they an abbr. for  something, for example. BTW the term gallows is more than misleading

(23-12-2018, 04:50 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the way, a very simple question: Why are most, first letters of a page gallows ?

If they are simply letters of words, the grammar of the underlying language might have an unusual structure or unusual habit.

Consider this (copied from Wikipedia):

English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and eventually became a global lingua franca.

If we expect the subject noun to be the first word, it should have more variety, instead of most-times-gallows. I don’t know if there is any language that mark the noun as subject by adding a prefix. If that is the case, the initial letter might do have less variety than we expected.

However, there are something else we could expect to be the first word. For example, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In this case, we could expect pages to begin with same words:

Being a West Germanic language, English was first spoken in early medieval England and eventually became a global lingua franca.

Please keep in mind that, though being a standalone word in English, copulae may not be standalone in Voynich language, and might be a prefix as well.

Another example is “first”:

First spoken in early medieval England, English is a Western Germanic language that eventually became a global lingua franca.

Using “first” as the first word would not be that strange, if contents of each topic begins from introducing the object’s history. Same thing might happen here, that “first” may be a prefix instead of standalone word, though such thing is less likely to happen. I personally do not know any language that expresses “first” as a prefix or something, but I can’t say impossible.

Also, there are still other possibilities. For example, maybe some of them are common phrases that frequently present at beginning of paragraphs, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

EDIT: Add explanation about copula and “first” might be prefixes. Thanks to MarcoP.

(25-12-2018, 04:23 AM)ChenZheChina Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(23-12-2018, 04:50 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the way, a very simple question: Why are most, first letters of a page gallows ?

If they are simply letters of words, the grammar of the underlying language might have an unusual structure or unusual habit.

Consider this (copied from Wikipedia):

English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and eventually became a global lingua franca.

If we expect the subject noun to be the first word, it should have more variety, instead of most-times-gallows. I don’t know if there is any language that mark the noun as subject by adding a prefix. If that is the case, the initial letter might do have less variety than we expected.

Hi Zhe,
as discussed by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (and others, I think), there is evidence suggesting that paragraph-initial words are generated from other words by attaching a gallows character as a prefix.
In my opinion, this is compatible with what you propose here, but incompatible with the other hypotheses you list. In particular, there is no evidence that paragraph-initial words are particularly frequent (nor particularly rare, actually).

Emma May Smith Wrote:Sometimes it is observed that Grove Words are unique. About 57% of the Grove Words in the Stars section are unique in the whole manuscript, and about 85% are unique in the Stars section. But about 65% of all words in the Stars section are unique, and a potentially higher percentage for the manuscript as a whole (the figures are hard to count due to words with difficult readings). We cannot consider Grove Words to be substantially different from the text as a whole on this count.

Hi Marco,

Thanks for the references.

From your references, it seems that the initial words, though commonly beginning with gallows, are still unique enough to be distinct words.

This seems to be compatible with subject-marker-as-prefix hypothesis, but is still not enough to completely deny the copula hypothesis.

The copula, in English, is usually a standalone word, but may not be standalone in other languages. For example, let us see this sentence in Korean (copied from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.):

저곳은 북한 땅이다.

This sentence have five words: 저곳 (this), 은 (subject marker), 북한 (North Korea), 땅 (land), 이다 (verb: to be).

Literally, it could be translated as “This is land of North Korea.” As you could see, in this sentence, both the subject marker and copula (to be) are not written separately, but as suffix of the pronoun and noun.

In Korean, you could also write sentences with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

장미는 빨개요.

This sentence have three or four words: 장미 (rose), 는 (subject marker), 빨개요 (빨갛다 adj: red + 어요 informal polite ending).

As you could see, the sentence ends in an adjective and has no copula. The subject marker and the informal polite ending mark somehow work as copula in English.

What I want to demonstrate here is, if it is possible for a language to express copula using suffixes, it is probably also possible for a language to express copula using prefixes. Copula as prefix is similar to subject marker as prefix, but slightly different.

Thanks for pointing out the uniqueness of initial words. I think I should edit my original post to make it clear.

At the end of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., they said that EVA-p might reads b and be an paragraph indicator, and Romani for “certainly, surely” is ba. Considering that this script may be abjad or abugida that omits vowel a, it sounds reasonable that EVA-p is used as an paragraph indicator.

Also, I said in the post above that it is possible that some common phrases starts paragraphs, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. For me, the phrase “Thus I have heard” is not that far from “certainly, surely”. So, it is possible that some common phrases could start paragraph in a very abbreviated way, even as a prefix.

This being an abjad script seems more probable to me. Malayalam is my mother tongue (it uses a Brahmic-derived script) and if all abugida scripts more or less follow that kind of style, there should've been a lot more vowel indicators (marks that are vowel specific, attached to consonants).