The Voynich Ninja

(26-02-2020, 11:08 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Or several paragraphs, each one marked by a symbol to the left.

Could be, though I  don't see why. Maybe to save space, because of all the text they needed to cram in? If that is the case, it would point to planning and foresight.

JKP: I agree the special sign is particularly smooth, though the hand on this folio is one of the finer ones so I don't think it was added separately. 

About the fancy gallow, I feel like they made it look like a banner on a post. This would not be too uncommon for initials...

Thanks for the highlighting you did, Koen, as in the past also, it helps take a more structured look at it.  i notice something from it now that i hadn't before, or perhaps i did but only in the abstract. This puts some substance to it, and helps me to communicate those abstract intuitive ideas. I do consider this the first page and thought the glyph list might have to do with the labelese in the rest of the quire, i thought it might be descriptive and possibly positional in a relative sense somehow, eg this is a port northeast of the previous labelled item, that next one is an inland community in a southeast direction from that one, or something to that effect. The lower three paragraphs had seemed to me to be continuation of the labelese references, but now with the three delineated, it occurs to me these three might correspond to the three sections of the TO maps. I see vague similarities, and some matches, to the various labels within the text of the paragraphs. 





I realize the two TO maps don't match in their labels. The rosettes version seems to me the most likely to be displaying the continents as labels, as they work with the imagery of what i consider to be the rivers and the rosettes that most closely relate to Europe, which bridges to the Europe labelled area of the TO, ie where it says Europe on the pic. Obviously others consider these associations a possibility also, this is not my pic.

Look at the first words of each of the three lower paragraphs. I am not saying they match, but they each have some similarities with the TO labels, similar to how the two TO label sets have their own similarities.

Hmmm the eva font is missing for me. Hard to show comparisons. Eva itself doesnt show what i am trying to show

polalchdy - chdy or 'cc89'  at the end speaks to me of Europe, as does the P, and there is a concentration of P words in the paragraph, as well as the top of the page itself. As i believe the manuscript to be Europe based, this would make sense to me. If you make the word, which is unique, shorter, you start to get matches in the big paragraph, then in other parts of quire 13, quire 20 and an odd plant page or two. Once you get down to chdy there are quite a few more plant pages with multiple examples, some zodiac and other page involvement, as well as quire 14 but the trend of quire 13 and 20 continues also.

poleedaran - aran at the end speaks to me of Asia, it is similar to the aral or oral or orol of the TO labels. As the river connection appears analogous to me as a means to reach northwestern Asia, (ie near the north marker in the pic) it makes sense that it would be the second mentioned. Few P words, which makes sense since there are waterways separating most of Asia from Europe, as shown in the TO (the blue lines that make up the T). No matches of partial word til you get to 3 or less characters at either end,  (the front end matches the above paragraph initial word as well) then you end up with quires 13, 14, and 20, and a couple of other odd pages. I didnt try taking out of the middle though.

qkor - 'qtlor' or 'qtlar' as i see it in my head as i 'read' it, seems very reminiscent of okar, or  'otlar' in the Africa section of the TO. Many mentions of otlar do occur within the page, including one in this paragraph and two in the one above it, as well as the body of the big paragraph. None in the posited Europe paragraph which makes sense as again they are separated by water, but there does seem to be a word resembling the Europe label in this paragraph, which also occurs at the top of the page, and also in quire 14, and in quire 20, plus two plant pages. I don't know about the plants, but this and the above connections put quire 20 as related to quires 13 and 14 in my view.

As it turns out, this idea fits in very well with my interpretation of quire 13's imagery, but it came from the similarity of the highlighted words with the quire 14 TO map.

Linda Wrote:Obviously others consider these associations a possibility also, this is not my pic.

You're right, Linda. It's not your pic, it's mine, and I did not post it on my blog because I was trying to assert that it was a map or a mappa mundi.

I was trying to describe a number of different interpretations for a three-division medieval drawing, and ONE of those interpretations was that it might be used  as an orientation symbol (in which case it won't necessarily have the names of continents as labels). That's why I added the compass. Since everyone in the Middle Ages was familiar with the symbol (and the way it pointed to east/west, etc.), it meant it could be used in a number of ways, not all of which were maps.

It can also be a cosmological drawing (three elements), an alchemical reference (philosopher's stone), and several other things. So I would be concerned if people got the idea that my drawing was intended to assert that it is a mappa mundi symbol because that was not the intention of posting it.

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Evidently the obviousness was a little more layered than came through in my saying 'obviously', i apologize, did not mean to ascribe any more meaning to your diagram than it appeared to contain. The name of the file didn't give me a hint, just went by what was there, as it illustrated the idea i had in mind, and it was the largest clearest example of the imagery i was referring to. You do a great job in your compositions, and i agreed with all the additions insofar as the reference i was making.[/font]

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]I actually also had in mind these, by Rich SantaColoma, Klaus Schmeh, and Darren Worley respectively, when i said 'obviously', (again just showing examples of the link to TO maps, not implying any other opinions that might have gone along with them)(sorry if i left anyone out)[/font]

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][/font][/font]

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]It was simply an attempt at pointing out that others before me have considered these tripartate circles as possibly being maps of continents, and this was just the hypothesis i was going with while considering the likenesses of the posited rosettes TO map to the paragraph trilogy and the various similar words.[/font]

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Perhaps the similarity of words refer to elements, alchemy, cosmology, trinities, mathematics or whatever, i simply didn't have those in mind while comparing the words because somehow along the way that is what both the words in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. text and that particular rosettes diagram spark in my mind, but i am certainly open to it being about something else. I can put a narrative to the continents idea being involved in the three quires, not so sure regarding the alternative considerations, that is why i didn't get into them, but if someone can do so, i am not automatically in opposition to it being a possibility. [/font]

Nevertheless it seems to me that whatever the topic turns out to be, t seems like there are some similarities between the rosettes tripartate circle and these paragraphs, that seem to link quires 13, 14, and 20 together, that was the point i was trying to make, not that it had to be about continents.

(26-02-2020, 10:35 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Now if this parallel is valid in any way, that somehow gallows are used because this is the top line, then the implications are significant: it would mean that these gallows replace something else that takes up less space.

Koen, I've been much taken with this idea ever since Geoffrey Caveney brought it up when he presented his Judeo-Greek theory. One day I played around on Voynichese.com looking for vords containing [p] or [f] which have a large number of tokens. Then I tried replacing the [p] or [f] with a different glyph or string of glyphs – I think [d], [dch], and [chd] were the main ones I tried. I remember feeling amused and encouraged that many of these substitutions yielded common vords as well.

I'd like to test the hypothesis that [p] could be equivalent to another glyph or string of glyphs more seriously and systematically, though. As someone with a lot of experience doing statistical analyses on the VMS, would you mind offering me some feedback on my proposed methodology:

1. Tabulate all the types containing [p] with >4 tokens, in order of most tokens to fewest.
   
2. For each type, run a search that replaces [p] with a wildcard of any length. Tabulate the total number of tokens found in the next column, next to the count for the original type containing [p]
   
3. In the next few columns, break down the tokens by the character or string which replaces [p], with a count for each
   
4. Sort each row so that each column represents the same substituted character or string.
   

If this hypothesis is false, then I should expect to see:

• Orders of magnitude fewer occurrences of [n*n] than [npn], or none at all, for most types containing [p]
  
• No pattern to the glyph or string which most often substitues for [p]
  
• Ratios of [npn] counts to [n*n] counts that are nowhere near the ratio of the number of first lines of paragraphs to the number of non-first lines of paragraphs
  

Where I'm not sure how to proceed is in determining statistical significance. Obviously I wouldn't expect the ratios to be uniform. But how different is too different to be expected by chance, if [p] really is interchangeable with something else? I wish I'd paid more attention in statistics class. In my medical school, students who weren't going for an additional Masters of Public Health (MPH) degree or doing a doctoral research thesis only needed to take a brief, cursory 2-credit course in statistics, and I've barely used it since.  

I think your setup is great!

Note that I'm really punching above my weight when it comes to statistical analysis. I wouldn't be able to do anything without the help of people like Nablator, Marco and Rene.

That said, there should be some way to calculate whether your detected pairs are statistically relevant. You would probably have to know how likely it is for a VM word type to have more than one token? Example,  If, say, 50% of words are hapax legomena, then you can expect 50% of your gallow words to be unique as well. And the other 50% will be expected to have multiple tokens in the MS. If 50% of them have the gallow replaced by the same glyph (or have a second identical token), your result would certainly be relevant.