(20-12-2018, 01:35 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is not difficult to come up with a possible explanation for this. In fact, one can up with many different possible explanations, both based on a meaningful text or on a meaningless text.
The difficulty is deciding which one is the right one.
Just some examples:
- two people started on a common agreement and both drifted in a different direction. (This can work both for meaningful and meaningless texts)
...
Hi René,
A quick question here. What made you think that there are
two people started on a common agreement and then diverged in different directions?
If that’s the case, they would started writing from the bridging parts, that is, astrology and cosmology parts, right? However, for me, it seems that Herbal-A, with a cover-like page You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. , is the intended beginning of the codex. Does it mean that they began writting from somewhere middle of the codex instead of from the beginning of the codex?
For me, it seems more natural if it was one person who gradually changed from Language A to Language B, because in this way they could write from Herbal-A, the intended beginning of the book.
The way scribes shared the workload was not always logical or based on sections. There are many medieval manuscripts where one scribe writes the first three pages and then the next paragraph on the fourth page, then another scribe writes a paragraph or two, then the first scribe takes over again at the bottom of the page. Sometimes it's because of a change in subject matter but often there is no discernible reason for the change in scribes.
The earlier post I wrote on this topic was just a very brief one, the tip of the iceberg so to speak, and not in any way systematic. That is in any case not possible in the frame of a blog post, but it is possible to expand a bit.
All possible options of what the Voynich MS text means, and how such a continuous variation of the language statistics could arise, can be subdivided into groups in several different ways. For example:
Choice 1: text meaningful or meaningless?
For the sake of the argument, let's assume that the option 'meaningful' means that there is a some source text which has been converted in some way to result into the Voynich MS text.
For the 'meaningless' case, either the text comes out of nowhere, or is somehow based on an existing text that was used as a 'model'. This second option is more interesting as this would explain the consistency and the language-like properties of the MS text.
Choice 2: the variation comes from a variation in the source text, or from a variation in the method of conversion.
We don't know this at all. This could also apply to the meaningless case, in case some model text was used.
Choice 3: the variation is in the meaningful part of the text, or is part of meaningless filler.
For this it is interesting to note that the B language tends to be more verbose, and also that frequent A language words exist also in B text, but this is not so much the case in the other direction
(Note that this is not really proven yet, but is an impression)
Choice 4: either A and B language words are different encodings of the same source text word, or, they are different source text words.
This is one of my favourite questions about this topic. I don't know the answer (of course).
This is also highly correlated with Choice 2.
Choice 5: the text is the product of a single person or of 2 (or more) persons
The main difference here is that for a single person, such a large variation would probably imply a longer creation time.
This gives rise to 2**5 = 32 combinations, but of course not all of them are meaningful.
About probabilities I don't even want to begin.....
Let's look at all this with an example of how the text could have been generated. This is the 'stroke encoding' that was once proposed by Elmar Vogt. Basically, it means that every component that makes up the written source text (horizontal lines, vertical lines, curves, circles, serifs, etc etc,) is reflected in one Voynich character.
(This may not seem a very realistic encoding method, but who knows: maybe the originator was very clever and wanted to devise a writing system which which all languages and scripts could be represented: Latin, Arabic, Hebrew etc.. Probably anachronistic, but it is just a model to be used as an example).
So, now the source text to be 'converted' is of course not a printed text, but a handwritten one.
This would mean that a text in a humanist hand could result in a different output than the same text written in a gothic hand. A source text with a variation in handwriting style could result in a variation of the output 'language'. Even, a source text with a discontinuity in the handwriting style could cause a gradual (but fast) change in the encoding, as the encoder gradually adapts.
Different people might break up the source characters into components in different ways.
The last case would be an example where Currier-A words and Currier-B words map back to the same source text words, but perhaps not in a trivial manner.
Anyway, this can be continued ad libitum.
(20-12-2018, 10:46 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Researchers have drawn different conclusions from this evidence:
Donald Fisk Wrote:...Prescott Currier reported in Papers on the Voynich Manuscript that the text is in two separate languages or dialects, now commonly referred to as Currier A and Currier B. It will be shown here that this distinction is somewhat fuzzy. There are differences (see "A Principal Component Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript Words"), but these can be explained more simply by differences in the text's subject matter.
Rene Zandbergen Wrote:This does not demonstrate that the text is meaningful, or that the text variations are caused by different subject matter (as suggested in by Montemurro and Zanette). If that were the case, the difference between herbal A and herbal B should not exist. The cause of the (statistical) language variation is still unexplained.
As always, things are puzzling. I understand that both points of view have their value.
Let's speculate 
What are the implications of these findings?
What the reasons for the observed phenomena can be?
I wrote that at the beginning of my investigation, when I assumed that the text was meaningful. On the same web page, I also showed that text pages on similar subjects (in Pliny's Natural History) do form distinct clusters. However, what I later found made me change my mind. I ended up concluding that the text was more likely to be meaningless, with the differences explained just as well by the author tweaking the parameters used in generating text (or, more generally, gradually changing the methods by which the text was generated), and that similar parameter values (or methods) were used for pages with similar illustrations.
(21-12-2018, 11:27 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So, now the source text to be 'converted' is of course not a printed text, but a handwritten one.
This would mean that a text in a humanist hand could result in a different output than the same text written in a gothic hand. A source text with a variation in handwriting style could result in a variation of the output 'language'. Even, a source text with a discontinuity in the handwriting style could cause a gradual (but fast) change in the encoding, as the encoder gradually adapts.
Different people might break up the source characters into components in different ways.
The last case would be an example where Currier-A words and Currier-B words map back to the same source text words, but perhaps not in a trivial manner.
Anyway, this can be continued ad libitum.
Hello René,
If there was a humanist hand, that would mean that the scribe had to read a printed book at the end of the 15th century (the first printed book in Italy was in 1464. In Spain the press was brought in 1472). Also we had to remember that the humanist script only became known after 1500s. Given those historical facts, I think it is completely impossible that the Voynich ms author had heard of or seen that type of writing style, only used for official documents and Classical Literature.
If the Voynich Ms author had known or seen the humanist script, that would necessarily involve that he worked for high-class members (as a secretary, a notary, a chancellor). For example, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) or Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) were the first Italian to use a New Gothic Script (a transition of Gothic cursive to a humanist style spread at the end of the fifteenth century thanks to the print press).
Salutati's handwriting:
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Here can be seen different types of
fere-humanistica lettera
caligrafiaarteydiseo.blogspot.com/2013/05/las-escrituras-del-renacimiento.html?m=1
So I cannot see how the Voynich scribe could use what was only known to a select group of people.
I like the analysis of ReneZ and I choose Choice number 4: Currier A and B are different encodings of the same source text word. Given that I don't believe in a linguistic solution, I prefer to say different encodings of the same source string symbol made by at least two scribes. For me it's the simplest solution. It's a new invented code and there are variants in the way to write it.
Instead of 'stroke encoding' I also prefer 'shape encoding' or better 'iconic enconding', a representation of the moving sky with astronomical symbols.
Of course the script is meaningful. It's the science of the XV century although it's hard to understand
Italian notaries of the 14th and 15th centuries were extremely influential in the development of the attractive and readable humanist scripts that eventually caused the Gothic scripts to fall out of favor.
The early printing presses copied and adapted styles that already existed.
With respect to humanist handwriting, my understanding is that this developed in the early 15th Century in or around Florence, and gradually spread out from there. At the instigation of Petrarca's writing about 'writing', Poggio really started this new trend in the 1410-1420 time frame.
So, indeed, by the time the Voynich MS was most likely produced, it would have been in its infancy, and it is rather unlikely that any significant writing using this script would have been available to the MS creator(s).
I used it as an example, and instead could or should have used Carolingian minuscule as a more likely example from the time perspective.
(21-12-2018, 11:27 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Choice 4: either A and B language words are different encodings of the same source text word, or, they are different source text words.
This is one of my favourite questions about this topic. I don't know the answer (of course).
This is also highly correlated with Choice 2.
Choice 5: the text is the product of a single person or of 2 (or more) persons
The main difference here is that for a single person, such a large variation would probably imply a longer creation time.
...
Here are some of my opinions.
For Choice 5, I asked how could you be sure that there were 2 or more persons, but the point is not the number of persons, but where they started. For me, it is totally possible that the book had
more than one author, and they worked on the book
one after one from Language A to Language B, so that the writing style changed as authors relayed.
Thus, for Choice 4, I prefer the second option, where different source text words were used to generate the Voynich language continuum. It is natural that a language could
evolve by generations, and therefore new generations speak different text words than old generations speak.
The main reason I think it might take several generations is the introduce of
EVA-x in Language B pages. According to Voynichese.com, EVA-x is absent in Language A pages, and is exclusive to Language B pages. This might imply that a new phoneme appeared in the new generation, and thus one new letter is required (example: G is introduced into Latin You are not allowed to view links.
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I thought I ought to mention that there's a big difference between "humanist" hands and "humanistic" hands which nobody ever seems to state here.
As should be well known by now, "humanist" hands were the formal styles of writing that emerged (as Rene says) around 1410-1420 (and which consciously aped the formal Carolingian writing of earlier centuries). By way of contrast, "humanistic" hands were hybrid hands that emerged in the mid-fifteenth century, courtesy of scribes who had been trained to write formal humanist documents, but where the shapes of those humanist letters had started to leech out into the rest of their writing: so a "humanistic" hand is a hand that has humanist elements leeching into it, but which isn't actually a formal humanist hand. When Sergio Toresella dates the Voynich hand to 1460-1470 (and I believe he is talking more about Currier A than Currier B for that), I'm certain that this kind of hybrid humanistic hand is what he is talking about.
In the Voynich Manuscript, we clearly don't see a humanist hand: but the 'raw' radiocarbon dating range would - as Sergio's dating implies - be I think a little too early for a humanistic hand. And this is a palaeographical paradox that isn't easy to shift. Oh, and feel free to go through all the palaeography source books you like (I went through more than fifty at the British Library), but I'll be surprised if you find anything matching well earlier than 1450.
As far as continuity between Currier A and Currier B goes, my position really isn't as polarized as selective quoting of Cipher Mysteries posts might make it seem. Yes, I do believe that at the heart of A and B lies a core change in the Voynichese 'container' rules: but I would be entirely unsurprised if those container rules had been changed for reasons to do with changes in the content. And such a change need not have been as brutal as a switch between Italian and Latin, it might be a variety of things, e.g. Roman numbers vs Arabic digits, Tuscan vs Venetian, etc.
Perhaps a more useful diagram to construct would be something that tries to capture not just clusters of pages, but what the differences in behaviours between those clusters are. That is, something more like a state machine, where the states are mutually stable clusters of pages or bifolios, and the transitions are the changes in behaviours. If we had been able to reconstruct (almost all of) the original codicological state of the manuscript, most of this task would probably be trivial: but alas, that remains work that has not even been attempted. (Oh well!)