The Voynich Ninja

Hi Marco,

For the whole VMS it looks You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

@Torsten:

Quote:3) See page 2: "We use the algorithm to create a 'facsimile' of the VMS 'Recipes' section."

Ok, I did not realize that.

Torsten, could you post three or four lines of text generated with your software? Many of the people on the forum have never seen the output from your program.

The programmers on the forum (this includes me) know how to go to github, download it and get it running, but not everyone knows how to do that and they are basically being excluded from the discussion by not being able to see the algorithmic output that everyone is talking about.

(26-05-2019, 09:55 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The occurrences of [daiin] for each page of the first quire are: 7 1 3 5 2 1 5 4 2 2 5 5 4. Considering that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has more words than any of the other pages, I don't see how this is anomalous. 

See the distribution of <daiin> for the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. There are pages without any instance of <daiin>. This is for instance the case for page 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..

See also the usage of <m> in quire 1 (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Note that the pages f3r, f3v, f6r, and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. belong to the same bifolio.

(26-05-2019, 09:55 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Indeed, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has 5 [daiin] over eight lines compared with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. having 7 [daiin] over 24 lines. Yet you give the signature word pair for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as [chol, chor], which also have 5 tokens, simply because that page doesn't have any strong matches to [daiin].

In fact page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is used as example in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Moreover, there are more pages using <daiin> in this way. See for instance page 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.. 

(26-05-2019, 09:55 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why did the writer choose to copy some words more than others on any given page?

Multiple instances of <daiin> can also mean that the writer was not modifying <daiin> while copying it.

(26-05-2019, 09:55 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why does the choice of words and word pairs seem unpredictable aside from their overall frequency? Why did the writer choose to write [daiin] a lot, but [dain] rather less, and [daiir] or [daiiin] a lot less?

They are not unpredictable. See figure 3 on page 6: "high-frequency tokens also tend to have high numbers of similar words." Moreover, "when we look at the three most frequent words on each page, for more than half of the pages two of three will differ in only one detail." 

Indeed, high frequency tokens differ from page to page. But there is a rule behind it. A word is used more frequently if more similar tokens exists on the same page. Note, a token is also similar to itself.

(26-05-2019, 09:55 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The page f89r2 has a massive 19 tokens of [daiin], yet zero [dain], one [daiiin], and zero [daiir]. He wrote [daiin] three times in a row!Linguistic theories are expected to account for this, but how can you? Did the writer not catch what he was writing? Was he suffering from monotony? Did he forget that he could spice things up a bit by dropping or adding an [i]? Was he simply insane? Blind? Experiencing dementia?

1) For the natural language hypotheses all pages should taken into account. Not just page f89r2.

2) Concerning the natural language hypotheses see page 5: "The overall structure of the VMS token network gives solid additional evidence the text could unlikely be identified as any natural language. ..."

3) If the intention of the scribe was to hide that only similar tokens are copied all the time, it was a mistake to repeat something. The easiest way to remove something repeated is to modify a repeated token. One additional quill stroke is enough to change a glyph into another one. This would also explains the lack of corrections. 

4) Indeed three repeated words in a row are probably a mistake. Maybe, the scribe did not notice or maybe he didn't care. But it is also possible that this is just a transcription mistake and we should transcribe this tokens as <daiin> <daiin> <daiinody> (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

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(31-05-2019, 06:13 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Torsten, could you post three or four lines of text generated with your software? Many of the people on the forum have never seen the output from your program.

The programmers on the forum (this includes me) know how to go to github, download it and get it running, but not everyone knows how to do that and they are basically being excluded from the discussion by not being able to see the algorithmic output that everyone is talking about.

In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the text can be downloaded as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Those are dead links (or maybe the person has to be registered to see them).

(31-05-2019, 07:50 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Those are dead links (or maybe the person has to be registered to see them).

I have fixed the links.

Please note: These "Additional materials" illustrate the argumentation given in "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Please read the paper first! Otherwise you would probably ask something already explained in the paper. 

It was already argued several times in this thread that a detail is slightly different than in the VMS. This is part of the argumentation. See page 15: "Of course, it is possible to pinpoint quantitative differences between the real VMS and the used facsimile text (most likely any facsimile text). ...  Keep in mind that the VMS was created by a human writer who had all freedom to vary some details of the generating algorithm on the spur of a moment. ..."

(26-05-2019, 11:18 AM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think it's best now to turn to Figure 4 (page 8) as a lot of the argument hinges on this. The graph shows that the edit distance between words is lower the nearer the words occur. Words are more similar by up to 0.3 of an edit distance within 30 (Herbal A) or 60 lines (Quire 20), before reaching a stable edit distance beyond those numbers of lines. A comparison with a text in English (Alice in Wonderland) is made.

A better choice than Alice in Wonderland for comparison with Herbal A would be the Latin translation of Dioscorides with Mattioli's commentary (1554). This is book 4, with titles removed to avoid spurious local repetitions of words.

[attachment=3000]
Horizontally: distance in lines (standardized to 60-80 characters), vertically: average edit distance between words of these lines.

The highly thematic text causes some repetitions of words and a significant part of the vocabulary of the Dioscorides text is repeated in the commentary, so some local similarities are not unexpected, but the effect is much less pronounced than in the VMS.

(26-05-2019, 10:07 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This would mean that every page has it's own topic.

And its own commentary. Maybe.

(07-06-2019, 03:29 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(26-05-2019, 11:18 AM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think it's best now to turn to Figure 4 (page 8) as a lot of the argument hinges on this. The graph shows that the edit distance between words is lower the nearer the words occur. Words are more similar by up to 0.3 of an edit distance within 30 (Herbal A) or 60 lines (Quire 20), before reaching a stable edit distance beyond those numbers of lines. A comparison with a text in English (Alice in Wonderland) is made.

A better choice than Alice in Wonderland for comparison with Herbal A would be the Latin translation of Dioscorides with Mattioli's commentary (1554). This is book 4, with titles removed to avoid spurious local repetitions of words.

Horizontally: distance in lines (standardized to 60-80 characters), vertically: average edit distance between words of these lines.

The highly thematic text causes some repetitions of words and a significant part of the vocabulary of the Dioscorides text is repeated in the commentary, so some local similarities are not unexpected, but the effect is much less pronounced than in the VMS.

This is an interesting example. Is the text online available? Could you post a link to the analyzed text sample?

Word repetitions are not enough to explain the effect for the VMS. There the effect also occurs because of similar tokens. Even for consecutive tokens the number of times they start with the same initial glyphs or end with the same final glyphs is significant. For a deeper analysis see table 1. "Initial-Initial dependency" and table 3 "Final-Final dependency" in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Vladimir Sazonov: "As it is clear from the tables 1 and 3, the words very often reproduce the same form (the same initial or the same final) in the next word. For example, -aiin or qo- or -dy can repeat many times with good density" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

(07-06-2019, 07:53 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is an interesting example. Is the text online available?

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Could you post a link to the analyzed text sample?

[attachment=3001]
(I removed the titles of chapters, errata marked {}, missing Greek words marked [GR].)

Quote:Word repetitions are not enough to explain the effect for the VMS.

Agreed, I wanted to see how much local repetitions and quasi-repetitions (Latin declension) can account for the phenomenon in a fairly normal text. I will try other Latin texts that are much more repetitive.

A necessary step to see the VM with renewed eyes is to do without the alphabet. When I look at the script I do not read daiin but a string of glyphs: one that looks like an eight, then another glyph that could be the letter a or a little circle with a tail, then three leaned stripes and finally another glyph that it looks like a half circle or it could be an ornament. 
  This is what the scribe wrote. Transliteration of the script allow computer software to analyse the 'text', but by  alphabetizing it predisposes the mind to think in a verbal language.
    As I put in the other thread, the Torsten's analysis rejects the hypothesis of a verbal language and concludes in the hoax hypothesis. But as René says there is more planning and system in the VM, rules that point to something meaningful. 
   Humans not only we communicate with words.

(07-06-2019, 03:29 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(26-05-2019, 11:18 AM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think it's best now to turn to Figure 4 (page 8) as a lot of the argument hinges on this. The graph shows that the edit distance between words is lower the nearer the words occur. Words are more similar by up to 0.3 of an edit distance within 30 (Herbal A) or 60 lines (Quire 20), before reaching a stable edit distance beyond those numbers of lines. A comparison with a text in English (Alice in Wonderland) is made.

A better choice than Alice in Wonderland for comparison with Herbal A would be the Latin translation of Dioscorides with Mattioli's commentary (1554). This is book 4, with titles removed to avoid spurious local repetitions of words.



Horizontally: distance in lines (standardized to 60-80 characters), vertically: average edit distance between words of these lines.

The highly thematic text causes some repetitions of words and a significant part of the vocabulary of the Dioscorides text is repeated in the commentary, so some local similarities are not unexpected, but the effect is much less pronounced than in the VMS.

Thank you so much for this. I agree that the effect is not as strong as for the Voynich text, but the pattern is similar. It's clear that the topic and type of text can influence the similarity of nearby words.