The Voynich Ninja

(02-08-2019, 08:36 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How can different source words be mapped into homographs and still produce a high TTR?

It's a good question.

Certainly, I don't see any way that medieval Tironian-style abbreviations could be present in Voynichese: but by 1450, these had all but disappeared from normal scribal use.

More generally, I struggle to see how Latin (where so much of the semantic content is held in the word ending) could be compatible with Voynichese, which has such a stylized paucity of endings.

The TTR results are challenging for anyone seeking to explain Voynichese in terms of a single defining mechanism. I believe that abbreviation will turn out to be part of the overall picture (because the changing word length is hard to account for otherwise), but only part of the picture.

It's the first time I see this image (as far as I recall), though I'm certain it must have been mentioned before. It drew my attention for obvious reasons, but upon closer inspection I noticed it's also got an interesting use of "labels":

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What's interesting there?

What looks like labels at first glance are actually syllables.

Manuscripts are full of syllables.

Many charts and especially wheel diagrams are full of syllables (especially in the semi-compotus manuscripts). Lullian diagrams often have syllables. Maps often have syllables broken across topology. Greek manuscripts and basically all Greek art are full of syllables. Most eastern scripts are based on syllables, not on individual letters. I have lots of samples of syllables from western manuscripts.

I've been thinking syllables for a very long time. I was quite surprised when I brought it up in the early days of the forum (or maybe it was on someone's blog), that there was active resistance to the idea. To me syllables are high on the list, not just a vague possibility.

(29-08-2019, 11:12 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What looks like labels at first glance are actually syllables.

They don't look like labels, it's immediately apparent that it is just fitting the lines into the available space, because the baseline is radial. In contrast to that, in the VMS the baseline is mostly circumferential, with few exceptions, but in those ones the labels either clearly label distinct objects (e.g. Voynich pipes) or they are placed at a significant distance from each other (e.g. the central Rosette).

Here's a slightly different view on the labels. Let's just consider the 300 zodiac labels.

None of them are 'very frequent' Voynich words. If we look at the five most frequent words, which I suspect to be:
daiin   chedy   Shedy   chol   aiin

and I count their occurrence in the MS using the table at the bottom of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , then I arrive at 2549 word tokens (apart from counting errors).
The total number of word tokens in the MS is of the order of 38,000 .
This means that 6.4% of all word tokens is one of the above five, but among the labels they don't appear.

If one were to take (arbitrarily) 300 words in the manuscript, then the probability that none of them is one of the above five is 2 * 10^ -9.

This just confirms what we knew: the labels are not standard VMs text, but something different.

(30-08-2019, 03:07 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Here's a slightly different view on the labels. Let's just consider the 300 zodiac labels.

None of them are 'very frequent' Voynich words. If we look at the five most frequent words, which I suspect to be:
daiin   chedy   Shedy   chol   aiin

and I count their occurrence in the MS using the table at the bottom of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , then I arrive at 2549 word tokens (apart from counting errors).
The total number of word tokens in the MS is of the order of 38,000 .
This means that 6.4% of all word tokens is one of the above five, but among the labels they don't appear.

If one were to take (arbitrarily) 300 words in the manuscript, then the probability that none of them is one of the above five is 2 * 10^ -9.

This just confirms what we knew: the labels are not standard VMs text, but something different.

Or it confirms that those five common words are not standard VMs text, but are themselves something different. For example, I recently wondered whether chol might (in some way) be the word 'AND': while I proposed back in 2006 that daiin and aiin might be visually concealing Arabic digits. chedy and Shedy the jury is out on, though. ;-)

That is, it may simply be that these five words are not nouns (or abbreviations of nouns) and so have no use in the zodiac's labelese. Just a thought.

That confirms neither.

For example, top most common words in English are: "the", "be", "to", "of" and "and". None of them would be normally expected as labels (articles can well be omitted in labels and titles). But that does not mean that those five words are non-standard or that labels in an English book are non-standard.

The interesting question that we discussed elsewhere is whether labels are in nominative, or in inflected forms.

Well, that is exactly my point.

I am not taking for granted that the VMs text is meaningful, or that the labels really are meaningful words, but considerations like these are actually a hint in that direction.

If all of the VMs text is somehow the result of a random process, in the style of Rugg or Timm, then we would see something different.

IIRC (but I am not sure) also Stojko interpreted the label text as running text, which should be clear not to be a valid assumption.

And yes, numbers also remain a valid option in my opinion, especially for the labels.