The Voynich Ninja

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has some interesting characteristics.

There are no illustrations.
The p chars are longer than usual but not overly embellished.
The f is very uncommon compared to the other "gallows" characters.
The rare char x appears on this folio.
Paragraph 5 has to curve down to avoid hitting the short line above. It looks like the scribe forgot there was a short line on the right and started the next paragraph too high.


The text consists of eight short "paragraphs" (blocks of text separated by a slightly larger space and an elongated p at the beginning).

• Six of these paragraphs have short lines that are left- or middle-justified.
  
• One of the short lines is right-justified.
  
• N.B.: All of the left-justified and mid-justified short lines end with y.
  
• N.B.: Of the 28 longest lines, 14 end with m... (50%) except one of those "long" lines is a bit shorter than the others and actually has g instead of m (9th from bottom). In languages that use Latin abbreviations, the [font=Eva]g and m chars have two different meanings (I don't know if this is the case in Voynichese but it's interesting that the scribe chose a variant character for the not-quite-as-long line).[/font]
  

In other words, the presence of certain characters may be related to the length and position of lines. Note that the short line that is right-justified has the same m ending as many of the long lines.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has quite a few similar characteristics, but it is not exactly the same as 85r.

It only has one line that is right-justified and it ends in y.

But the beginning glyphs are similar to 85r, and the propensity for long lines to end with m or g is also similar.

Of the 37 longest lines, 13 end with m or g.

The one that ends in g is a long line, so there isn't any obvious distinction between it on the m on this folio in terms of line length, BUT notice how all the m chars at the ends of lines are preceded by a or o (as is common), EXCEPT the g char near the end of line near the top and the one at the end of line near the bottom, which are both preceded by e.


In other words, there might be a distinction between m and g in Voynichese.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the dense text on the right-hand side of the foldout) differs from the previously-mentioned folios by having a number of spanning gallows and possibly combined gallows.

The rare char x occurs on this folio.


Of the 45 lines, 12 end with om/am. The proportion is not quite as high as the other two folios, but it is still more than a quarter of the lines.

There is also one instance of line-end g preceded by n. Note that unlike the end-line m, it is not preceded by o or a.


So, as with the preceding two folios, when it is at the end of the line g is preceded by different chars than m.

Not all transcripts acknowledge the morphological difference between m and g but it is recorded in the EVA chart.

I don't want to complicate this thread with too many issues, but there is another interesting dynamic on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

If you lean back from the screen and look at the spacing, you might notice there is a wider vertical space between tokens in the second paragraph. It looks like it may have been written in two blocks, a narrow block on the left and a wider block on the right. Note how the larger block (the right-hand block), also "starts" with a benched gallows char, just as the beginning of the left block starts with a benched gallows:

[attachment=4225]

There are numerous folios with this odd alignment of spaces—sections of text that look like blocks may have been added in sections rather than in long continuous lines. Sometimes the sections appear to be diagonal rather than vertical. Do some of the gallows chars act as a "signal" for some of these spatial divisions in the text?

This is one of the many aspects of the VMS that is not reflected in transcripts.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows a similar pattern to the first three mentioned.

There are 41 lines and more than a quarter of them end with m or g.

As with the previous examples, m is always preceded by a or o*, and the one instance of g is preceded by e. Like the others, there appears to be a distinction between m and g in terms of the preceding character.


*Not quite... there is one exception, maybe. On the first line, m either stands alone (after dal) or it is preceded by l (which would be unusual). It's hard to tell if there is intended to be a small space between dal and m.

(23-04-2020, 07:20 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are numerous folios with this odd alignment of spaces

Try coloring this kind of watermark formed by spaces for see how it looks.

On You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a page of ragged text. It is only justified on the left-hand side.


In the dense-text folios mentioned above, the m char occurs at the ends of double-justified lines about 27% to 50% of the time.
On folio 81r, it only occurs once out of 31 lines (more than half the lines end in y but m is scarce).


Have the other folios been padded to double-justify the text? Is that why they frequently end with m and this folio doesn't?


Is this because 81r contains a different form of information (like a poem or song)? Or is it because the lines were not padded with additional text?

Now look at the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which has a similar page layout and drawing. The text is double-justified and...

... out of 27 lines more than half the lines end in y, but only one ends in m. So... the composition of line-end glyphs is similar to 81r with the ragged lines.

Sticking with f85r(1), note how the page ends with a single centre aligned sentence of four words. Could well be a valediction or something. (Voynichese.com reads it as five words). All are common words except for the middle one, olpchdy, which is unique.
But the most interesting bit is this paragraph:

What would cause that right hand justification of text? Obviously the scribe started the next paragraph, then after a couple of words realised he had forgotten to finish the above paragraph!!! So he had to squeeze it in.
Things like this are really the only counter-proof to the many "nonsensical-texts" theories out there. If the text has no meaning, why do this?
It is also an indication that this text is being copied from a source.

That's an interesting view, David. If this is really the best explanation then I would agree it argues against nonsense text.

Unless the nonsense text was to be copied exactly.

(23-04-2020, 07:53 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Sticking with f85r(1), note how the page ends with a single centre aligned sentence of four words. Could well be a valediction or something. (Voynichese.com reads it as five words). All are common words except for the middle one, olpchdy, which is unique.
But the most interesting bit is this paragraph:

What would cause that right hand justification of text? Obviously the scribe started the next paragraph, then after a couple of words realised he had forgotten to finish the above paragraph!!! So he had to squeeze it in.
Things like this are really the only counter-proof to the many "nonsensical-texts" theories out there. If the text has no meaning, why do this?
It is also an indication that this text is being copied from a source.

I don't think it's obvious that the scribe forgot to finish the above paragraph. I think there might be another explanation. There are numerous partial lines in the VMS in the middle and on the right-hand side (including on the first page).

It's possible that when he started the NEXT paragraph (after writing the partial line), he forgot there was a dangling line on the previous line and thus didn't move down far enough on the left to accommodate it and ended up having to curve the text under it to work around his mistake.