The Voynich Ninja

@ Marco

I was not familiar with that page, thank you for mentioning it! Bunn credits the idea to Jim Reeds. Personally, I don't find it very convincing, though everything is possible of course

I think you are right there

I think ind the Yale ms. someone misread  h[erba] reuma as greuma  and inserted another herba, there is                 without doubt a u, someone added two i-strokes

Is this an image-break ?  The ligature appears to be split.  ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [ olcthr ] )
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Bonus: text on top of image.

Thank you, RobGea! As always with the VMS, there are cases that are particularly difficult to classify. The word at the top is an ordinary image-break, but for the detail that the word on the right appears isolated, with no other words above or below.
The one at the bottom is rendered as a single word in ZL, but I agree that there could be a split.

In general, the page is particularly rich in text/image overlaps. Thank you for pointing it out!

Thanks @RobGea, I thought it was never written on parts of the illustrations. Your example proves that this assumption was wrong. I'm really happy about that.

Following Emma's observations, I have computed a couple of slightly more accurate bigram diagrams. The main differences are:
Benches were changed into C and S and benched-gallows into K T P F;
* I computed bigram prefixes and suffixes considering the three disjoint sets of image-breaks, line-breaks and "ordinary" space-breaks;
* Here line-breaks do not include what appear to be paragraph-breaks (which appear to be another different set because of Grove words).

I still only considered data from pages that contain at least a line interrupted by illustrations.

The following diagram illustrates suffixes before the various breaks. Those before and image-break are comparable with suffixes before a line-break: the red and green bars are similar, while the blue bar often stands out. As already discussed, the only major difference is -am, which has a spike at line-end but not before an image-break.
[attachment=3451]

Prefixes after the various breaks are much harder to compare. For instance, che- and she- (Ce- and Se- in the graph) behave differently in the three cases; yt- yk- are another, total different, example. 
PS: in term of Emma's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., one can observe that words after an image break typically favour a weak initial (e.g. cho- ok- yk- yt-) symmetrically "disliking" a strong initial (qo- and the almost total absence of initial gallows). However, there are exceptions to this hypothetical pattern: in particular da-.

[attachment=3452]

Marco, while you're right that words starting [che, she] or [yk, yt] behave differently after mid-breaks, they still have the same preference. Both [che, she] are less common after mid-breaks and after line breaks, while both [yk, yt] are more common. They're simply not responding to the same degree, though they are showing the same preference. Naturally, it depends on the statistics whether the smaller changes are robust enough to draw evidence from.

I, too, find the [qo] statistics interesting here. Note that [qo] is much lower after mid-breaks while [ot] is much higher. I know we've discussed in the past the relation between [t] and [k], especially in the presence of [q].

Interestingly, [sa] is more common after both line breaks and mid-breaks, yet words starting [a] are only missing after line breaks and not mid-breaks. I had thought that [sa] was replacing [a] at the start of lines, yet clearly must rethink this idea.

(05-10-2019, 06:53 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Marco, while you're right that words starting [che, she] or [yk, yt] behave differently after mid-breaks, they still have the same preference. Both [che, she] are less common after mid-breaks and after line breaks, while both [yk, yt] are more common. They're simply not responding to the same degree, though they are showing the same preference. Naturally, it depends on the statistics whether the smaller changes are robust enough to draw evidence from.

Hi Emma, thank you for your comment!
I agree with your observations. In general, the direction of change with respect to space-breaks is the same for image and line-breaks. Among prefixes, qo- and cho- may be the most notable exceptions.

(05-10-2019, 06:53 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I, too, find the [qo] statistics interesting here. Note that [qo] is much lower after mid-breaks while [ot] is much higher. I know we've discussed in the past the relation between [t] and [k], especially in the presence of [q].

I do hope that these comparisons can help us understand more about qo-. As you say, ot- is much higher for image-breaks than for space-breaks; ok- is also higher: the two differences add up to about 4%, while the qo- difference is 11%. It seems possible that also yt- and yk- (8% difference total) are involved in what is happening here.

(05-10-2019, 06:53 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Interestingly, [sa] is more common after both line breaks and mid-breaks, yet words starting [a] are only missing after line breaks and not mid-breaks. I had thought that [sa] was replacing [a] at the start of lines, yet clearly must rethink this idea.

If I understand correctly, your idea seems to work for line-breaks, but not for image breaks. I find it difficult to understand if one should conclude that the idea is not correct, or that line-breaks and image-breaks are significantly different phenomena. Even if directions of change are largely consistent, the prefix histogram  seems to me to suggest that the second option is worth considering.

I collected some more data, this time focussing on last-first combinations. Also in this case, I only considered pages containing at least one image-break.
[attachment=3459]

The graph illustrates last-first character combinations across the different kinds of break. For instance, -y.o- is based on a word ending by -y followed by a word starting by o- (e.g. qopchy.otshol). The combinations included are those that are expected to be more frequent across image-breaks: since the set of image-breaks  is limited, measuring combinations that are expected to be small is difficult. The total number of couples in each set is:

• space-break 11050
  
• line-break 1868
  
• image-break 751
  

The plotted measure is the difference between the actual number of occurrences for a combination and the expected count (based on the frequency of the suffix and prefix), normalized by the total number of couples in each set. When the suffix of a word and the prefix of the following word are perfectly independent, the measure is 0. From the graph, it is clear that space-breaks produce word couples that differ from the expected much more than the other two cases.
If one adds up the absolute values of the normalized differences, the resulting totals for these combinations are:

• space-break 18.0%
  
• line-break 7.1%
  
• image-break 7.6%
  

Considering that line-breaks and image-breaks are about one order of magnitude fewer than space-breaks, there could be a greater influence of accidental / random deviation in the smaller sets: yet these sets appear to deviate much less than space-separated couples.
In other words, when word A is separated from word B by a space, there is some kind of "interference" between the two words which results in predictable suffix.prefix combinations (the phenomenon we discussed in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). This kind of "interference" does not happen, or is much weaker, across line-breaks and image-breaks.

In the paper, we also discuss how last-first dependence is stronger in Currier B than in Currier A (as already noted by Currier himself). I am now thinking of comparing image-breaks with Currier A, in order to see if any strong parallel can be found: the relative rarity of EVA:q is another trait in common between the two sets.

I have tried separately processing data for Currier A and B. Again, I only considered pages that include at least an image-break. The pages are almost equally split between the two languages, so both sets are large enough to be meaningful. I cannot see anything particularly illuminating in the new graphs.

[attachment=3584]

As already observed, with the exception of -am, suffixes before an image break behave similarly to those before a line-break. In B, -dy is also different, being considerably more frequent before an image-break than a line-break: but nothing as dramatic as what happens with prefixes.

[attachment=3583]

The drop in q- after an image-break remains the most striking feature, and it is stronger in Currier A. In Currier B, several other prefixes behave differently after an image-break or a line-break: e.g. ok-, yk-, she-, sa-, so-.

Tentatively, one could say that an image break affects the suffix of the preceding word like line-breaks do. But the prefix on the other side of the break behaves differently. This seems to point out that the phenomenon is not entirely the same in the two cases, but it is not independent either. For instance, it seems that one can exclude that words are typically split into two halves in one of the two cases but not in the other: this would not explain why suffixes before the two breaks are so similar.