The Voynich Ninja

Anton: I would disagree the symbol "4" is a just the same kind of symbol as a triangle.

If I draw a large symbol "4" on a piece of paper, it is reasonable to ask someone is that is a drawing of the symbol "4".

I think with the framework you describe it feels we will never know or be able to know the Voynich alphabet.

When the author draws the symbol "4o" they might have been trying to draw the letter "z", but they are so bad at drawing it that it ends up by looking like a "4o". However it seems unreasonable to consider that as a possibility.

We have already established some consensus as to what the different Voynich symbols are,  however it feels like some people are saying we can't do pragmatically what has already been done.

A "4" is approximately a right-angled isosceles triangle where the lines of the two sides of the triangle adjacent to the right angle have been extended in the direction of the right angle by about half the length of the corresponding sides. So I think it can be treated like an abstract geometric shape.

Anton: The follow thread of yours looks very relevant ->

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Quote:In addition the symbol "4" is a known and common symbol of the time.

That's certainly true. But if the guy was clever enough to secret his writing for half a millennium, he would probably be clever enough, as part of this scheme, to mask his glyphs (or combinations thereof) under common symbols. In fact, very many Voynichese symbols are common for the time. Yet it is still a question whether, say, n is a single symbol of the alphabet or a sequence of two symbols of the alphabet, or some operator performed on the two elementary operands, those two components being the i and the tail.

This supposed common glyphs toomfoolery (if it's been intentional), however, would betray itself in hasty handwriting. I think that images posted by JKP above distinctly show that q is not simply a plain "4" shape, that it is decomposed into two distinct components at least merely graphically, whatever underlay is intended to be conveyed by that.

Quote:I think with the framework you describe it feels we will never know or be able to know the Voynich alphabet.

Well, I think that the only efficient approach to know it is to discover the encoding mechanism. In this approach, decomposition of a vord into symbols will be revealed after (and through) discovering that vord's meaning. Not through a single vord, of course, but through a sufficient set of interpreted vords. So this is kinda entering from the backyard.

If the text were a simple 1:1 mapping (with whatever alphabet), one might have come to the correct interpretation of the alphabet through normalizing statistical properties of the text (say, character entropies), but alas it just does not seem that. E.g. there is an exceedingly quaint feature of the gallows coverage, which simply goes beyond the "alphabet level".

Quote:A "4" is approximately a right-angled isosceles triangle where the lines of the two sides of the triangle adjacent to the right angle have been extended in the direction of the right angle by about half the length of the corresponding sides. So I think it can be treated like an abstract geometric shape.

Well of course it can, that is just what transcription does. It puts forward a proposed alphabet (of abstract shapes), then it parses through the text and for each piece of text it makes a decision which abstract shape it best corresponds to.

But in this we come back to what Rene asked - that is, to the essence of your question which is the title of the thread. Are we intersted in how it could be transcribed or in how it should be transcribed? There are several transcription alphabets for the Voynich. Which one is closer to the real one, though?

f18v is a good illustration of how q is written down. First a vertical (often a hooked vertical) is put down, then the curve is begun from the top counterclockwise and to the right.

Anton: Thanks for your comment I will answer it all in more detail. But first my interest is the point of origin of the Voynichese script and how the Voynichese "4" shape pertains to that. If the left-hand side of a gallows character is a "q" shape or instead a "4" shape it makes a difference as one will have greater or lesser associations with existing scripts.

So in that sense I suppose you would say that I am interested in how it should be transcribed.

"q" is common in Latin scripts from early in their history. The lower-case "q" is common since Caroline-script times.
"4" exists in Latin scripts (in its modern form) from the 14th century onward and is common from the mid-15th century onward.
"4o" is common Latin scripts from about the 14th century onward, depending on the language (especially in Romance languages for writing ordinal numbers).


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Having said that, I'm not sure EVA-q is a 4 or a q shape. It might be a sword-shape written with a swoosh to obscure it or to make it easier/faster to write. It might be a staff shape or a cross shape. The stem is quite long, so it's not necessarily the numeral-4 shape. It might be a vertical bar with a ligatured "c" character or a vertical bar with an obscuring triangular shape.

Anton: I think I am looking at the question of what the author was trying to draw when discussing the "4" shape. Obviously when writing quickly one does not have the time to make sure each character is drawn perfectly precisely and anyway at the microscopic level this is impossible. Human error and natural limits to one's ability to control the pen in one's fingers precisely so that one's drawing of a letter is a perfect representation of what one aims to draw, means the result shape is not exact in its desired form. Also the fluidity of the drawing of the shape must affect its appearance.

When the author draws an "o" shape or an "a" shape or an "8" shape we can say that those are the same as these well-known shapes, which have implications for the point of origin of Voynichese symbols i.e. latin style letters and arabic numerals. I think one can extend this association to the "4" in the gallows characters with its further implications for the influence on the script. Furthermore it is the case that this style of symbols is very consistent with the kind of symbols that we see in diplomatic cipher symbols, but I think it is probably much less consistent with the scripts that we see in many natural languages.

If t and k are ligatures (which is quite possible), then perhaps the VMS q symbol is just a downshifted copy of the left part of the t ligature.

In which case, it may not be related to q at all, the similarity may be coincidental (or the down-shifting might be deliberate in order to make it look like q and obscure the fact that it's related to t).