The Voynich Ninja

If gallows are pilcrows, then it would follow that we can't trust the spaces between vords to reflect actual spaces, and/or that some spaces are expressed by something other than spaces.
As JKP stated there are multiple texts with pilcrows throughout the paragraphs. But these are always followed by spaces, and that is not the case in the Voynich. Another problem with that is, what about benched gallows?

(21-03-2019, 06:33 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It wasn't really meant as a riddle. Also, the second example is 'closer' in a way, since the inverse of the operation also allows compression of real Voynichese.

However, this is *not* how the real MS text was generated. At best it could give a hint into the direction.

The reduction in entropy with respect to the Italian text is the result of  a verbose substitution.
The word patterns arise by chopping up the original text in syllables (sort of), in combination with the verbose substitution. A syllable in this case is defined by :
- a consonant cluster followed by a vowel cluster
I chose Italian because very many words end in a vowel, so the above definition of syllables largely (but not completely) keeps word boundaries intact.

The conditional entropy of the compressed Voynich text goes up to a staggering 3.1
The problem is with the single character entropy, which is 'only' 3.7.
It is not just the value that is still too low. It is the frequency distribution as a whole that is wrong, and this is not easy to fix.

This is very interesting. Especially the inverse operation generating compressed Voynich text with 3.1 conditional entropy. But I recognize the other problems that remain.

By the way, with any language, for words that end in consonants you can simply add a "dummy" or default vowel at the end of all such words, and treat the resulting syllable like any other syllable. In fact, when languages with final consonants are written in syllabary scripts, this is effectively what the script does to them. (Although when Mycenaean Greek was written in the Linear B script, it rather tended to omit the final consonant from the written representation entirely.)

However, I believe we must also consider the possibility of the Voynich MS scribe using a process that does *not* allow us to perform a direct inverse operation. For example -- and this was also true with Linear B -- using the same symbol to express two or more actual distinct phonemes in the language. (Linear B did this for /r/ and /l/, for /p/ and /ph/, and for /k/, /kh/, and /g/, for example.) The type of process you are using can never be used to turn Linear B back into Mycenaean Greek, because Linear B simply did not distinguish between Greek "korus, "gorus", and "khorus", for example.

I think it would be very interesting to do entropy and character pair distribution analysis on the Linear B texts. I would not be surprised if, due to the simplifications of Greek described above, they have statistics similar to Hawaiian and Voynichese. Actually no, the fact that syllables like "ko", "po", "to", "ro" are all different symbols, and do not share a common "o" character, would increase the entropy, etc. But converting Linear B into an alphabetic transcription may then likely produce text with statistics like Hawaiian and Voynichese.

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(21-03-2019, 09:01 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Pilcrows and capitula were frequently in line with the main text, not just at the beginnings of paragraphs.


Also, a pilcrow sometimes looks like a letter (especially in the middle ages). The Capitula symbol was a "C". Sometimes it had a vertical stroke through it, but not always. Sometimes the only way you could distinguish it from the letter C was because it was in a different color. In other words, the C shape could be both a pilcrow and a letter. Some pilcrows look like t without the loops.

I've posted two blogs with examples:

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In the second blog, there is a pic that shows how pilcrows sometimes stretch over more than one letter, just as some of the VMS gallows glyphs sometimes stretch over more than one glyph.


Here's an example of pilcrows that are in line with the main text:

Thank you for sharing JKP, these examples are very interesting. That second text you posted is incredibly difficult to read.

Vertically separated paragraphs as we see in the VMs were very unusual on text-only pages. (They could occur in poetry because lines could not be joined.) This is yet another evidence (with the use of repetitive patterns that could easily have been abbreviated) that economy of space was not a concern.

(21-03-2019, 09:23 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
"... That second text you posted is incredibly difficult to read. "
...

That funny loop shape that looks a bit like a squished "d" is actually an "e". If you can get used to that, then it's not so hard to read.


Some of the Gothic bookhands could be very nice, but the average person wrote cursive and Gothic cursive is pretty ugly (especially when abbreviated).

Gothic (and its cousin Anglicana) were harder to read than the Italian/humanist texts and eventually scholars had the good sense to abandon Gothic in favor of humanist scripts.

John Dee's formal handwriting is a good example of what humanists learned from the Italians. It's a nice calligraphic hand (as opposed to his note hand which was very scrawly).

I think that existence of vords such as okchop strongly discourages the idea of gallows as pilcrows.

There's no reason why a gallows cannot be both a pilcrow and a letter. Everything scribal in the Middle Ages was based on context.

In Greek and Latin texts, the shapes P and C are pilcrows/capitula and they are also letters. They do not always have the vertical stripe through them. They are sometimes distinguished only by color. If the VMS designer were trying to obscure the text, then removing the color distinction would immediately do so.

I'm not saying they are pilcrows (although the paragraph-initial ones very much look like they might be), but they could be both pilcrows (when paragraph-initial or sentence-initial) and letters (in other positions).

(22-03-2019, 12:35 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think that existence of vords such as okchop strongly discourages the idea of gallows as pilcrows.

This word fits my old hypothesis that the f and p are top-line equivalents (embellished forms)  of Eva r and/or l .

(22-03-2019, 12:47 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(22-03-2019, 12:35 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think that existence of vords such as okchop strongly discourages the idea of gallows as pilcrows.

This word fits my old hypothesis that the f and p are top-line equivalents (embellished forms)  of Eva r and/or l .

I can see the resemblace. Do you have a hypothesis for its use as such beyond embellishment?

It reminds me of my own findings thus far, albeit i readily admit being new to looking at the text. In a cursory look at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. labels for possible directional coding, i found k to act like a combination of r and l. They stood for northeast, east, and north respectively. I have to look into it further though.

With regard to p, the use of opccol8g and opcc9 in the TO maps where Europe would be has been tugging at my brain as being a big clue. I am pretty sure that the latter is simply an abbreviation of the other. Could p stand for west? Actually it is the one without the curl in the crosser, it appears to point to the left, or west, in a north up representation of the character. Or maybe the cc is the part that means west, as in occidens. That works with r indicating oriens, or east. But then what would p denote? The local world perhaps, as you mention it seems to contain other glyphs within it. But r never follows it. Perhaps it indicates the perspective of the author, as being in the western world. Might be a papal aspect to it?



The Africa section labels are otadol and okor. The second letters in my findings so far denote southeast and northeast respectively. So my system either doesnt work here or is related to the placement of the rosettes TO, in that its original orientation is like this. But the last letters work out in this way. 



This may also be why the Europe tag is truncated, since the replaced part includes l or north, and it is no longer so in this orientation, although west would be correct. But then it is not correct in the other version, yet is if you orient it so that Asia is to the east in a north up representation. So i dont know, still looking into the possibilities. There are enough instances of it working to keep me investigating the idea. It could be related to updating the TO east up tradition to the north up orientation that was starting to trend. There were south up map representations as well.

The Asia spot reads oral in the rosettes and there is 8orol central in first line of the other, to me the addition of 8 in front of o means inland location rather than on the water. I have read that others consider a and o related as well. So it includes the east and north symbols in both cases. East works for indicating Asia, and most of it is north of Africa, so that works too. 

Anyway just wanted to include this specific use of p since it is one of the few that has apparent context in its usage.

Thank you Linda! This is more very interesting material.

In case you and others are interested, my (quasi-Judaeo-)Greek letter correspondences produce the following readings of the TO map labels on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 3:

Europe: [opcholdg]

my reading: "Apheonus"

interpretation: "Japhe-(g)onous"

meaning: "Japheth-born" or "the descendants of Japheth"


Africa: [otodol]

my reading: "AkhAbon"

Here I must extend the interpretation of [d] to include the other labial sound "m",
to allow the interpretation "Kham-(g)on",
an abbreviation of "the descendants of Ham"


Asia: on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 3 this is a long text. 
The word [ykeol] does occur twice in the text,
and I can read it as "stheAm"

It is possible this may be a reference to "Shem", although I will need to make sense of the "th" in the word.

Geoffrey

The blog that I've been trying to get posted for the last three weeks (more like the last three months) talks about the biblical origins of the T-in-O shape.