The Voynich Ninja

I'm quite excited at the examples provided by Rene in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Quote:In my transliteration I have three annotations related to gallows intruding in the line above. There may be more of course. They are here:

f78v, sixth line of the second paragraph: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

f95v2 line 4: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the Beinecke scan is better here)

f95v1, paragraph 2 line 2: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

There is another marginal case in the middle of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where 'something happened': You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

As Rene points out, such cases may be hinting that certain lines were written before others.

The gallows with their loops reaching upwards are good flags to inspect such behavior. Let's call it the "gallows intrusion" for brevity, meaning that the top of the gallows "intrudes" the above line, forcing part thereof to draw apart or to move slghtly upwards in order to avoid interfering with the intruding gallows.

I noted that in all Rene's examples the intruding gallows is in the odd line of the paragraph, while the line suffering from the intrusion is the even line. Which suggests that lines may have been written in alternating order, first odd ones, then even ones.

For the first screening attempt I checked f1r. I placed line numbers for convenience. I found four occurrences of gallows intrusion here, marked with blue ellipses. In the first and fourth occurrences, the whole vord suddenly jumps notably higher (as compared to the preceding vord). In the second and third occurrences, part of the vord (starting, in both cases, with a gallows) jumps higher as compared to the preceding character of the same vord (in both cases it's the glyph o). In all cases the intruding gallows are in odd lines.

There are other occurrences of "jumps", both in even and odd lines, which are not associated with any "intrusions" from the below lines. This suggests that "jumps" may be just a regular habit of the scribe, or/and that they are caused by some other effect, not the effect of alternating the lines in writing.

Of course, more folios need to be examined for this behavior. What do you think? Do I see just what I want to see?

[attachment=4271]

More generally, even if the "alternating lines" hypothesis proves false (and it's easily checked by inspecting more folios), it's still likely that the vords above the intruding gallows were written after the vords containing the intruding gallows.

Respectively, if we manage to detect a pattern of one (or both) of these subsets of vords, that could be a huge leap forward.

Yes, a series of subtle forced errors could provide a way to penetrate into the secrets of the manuscript. This makes sense.
I wonder if this changes at all by Currier A and B or by scribe? Would love to know what Lisa thinks!

Philip Neal noted that some odd and even lines seemed to have been written out of order a decade or so ago. I'll try to find some of the discussion and post some links here.

It's a very interesting subject, but I have some questions beforehand.
Could we come up with concrete rules for classification? When is a gallow intruding and when not? 
And how do we know the order of writing? All I see is that one actor takes the other one into account. But is the word jumping the intruding gallow, or is the intruding gallow taking up the space left by the jumping word?

I think it's seen already from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that it's not that simple as just odd/even. For example, 3rd paragraph, end of line 3. oldain d evidently climbs up due to the two intruding gallows in the below line 4.

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(03-05-2020, 02:21 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But is the word jumping the intruding gallow, or is the intruding gallow taking up the space left by the jumping word?

Yes, that's the point I've also been thinking of. There are plenty of examples which can be interpreted like the scribe just "fit" the gallows of the line below into the space between vords of line above. I think such cases are indecisive. What's decisive is when the baseline of the "intruded" line suddenly changes in view of the intruding gallows. I will show that in my below post.

(03-05-2020, 02:21 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But is the word jumping the intruding gallow, or is the intruding gallow taking up the space left by the jumping word?

Exactly. You may want to take a look at the three examples I listed. I think they are 'at least suspicious'. Already the fourth I have doubt.

The scenario I had in mind was not so much related to odd/even lines, but rather that occasionally a full line is written, and more frequently just the first few words.

I've been thinking of all this from a broader perspective, which may be called "spatial plot theory".

Some hints which lead to it are:

• attempts to approach the decipherment from the character or token stats perspective have been vain so far
  
• there are certain marks (like gallows intrusion) that certain portions of the text were written "out of order" - probably not just lines were placed out of order, but spatial blocks of text
  
• failure to detect narration structure of the text; I'm not aware of much research in that direction, so I rely on mine own, in respect of the Voynich stars; and the absence of traces of structure strongly suggests some kind of shuffling
  

Now, therefore.

Suppose the text was not written in line-after-line fashion.

Note that this does not imply that the text was not written left-to-right. For example, I can first fill two words in each line, then fill two more words in each line, then yet 2 more words in each line, et cetera. Thus the text is written left-to-right, but it is not written line-after-line or even word-after-word.

Suppose that the meaningful text is written by placing blocks of it in pre-defined spatial portions of the folio (or, maybe, this is paragraph-confined - in that case, blocks are placed in pre-defined spatial portions of the paragraph). And the way in which the text is placed (and should be read) is known in advance, or is marked by certain markers (maybe some gallows).

And then you fill in the remaining space of the folio (or of the paragraph) with meaningless filler. That filler may still be valid vords, but it is not subject to be read-in in the process of decipherment. This moves it closer to the hoax theory in general, and to auto-copying theory in particular, because the simplest way to introduce filler is either to insert some general null token (like maybe daiin), or to reduplicate or quasi-reduplicate the preceding (or the following) vord. Thus the "auto-copying" paradigm is valid, but only for a subset of the text!

Now, this will mess all sorts of statistics.

1) the token frequency is distorted
2) the character frequency is distorted, and so are the entropy values
3) this has both the effect of shuffling (the text is not to be read simply word-after-word) and of introducing null tokens - hence, the structure of narration is undetectable

How can we trace what's going on? I think, by examining the behaviour of the baseline - especially in the cases of reduplication and quasi-reduplication.

Below I attach You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where I placed the baselines in a few paragraphs.

Paragraph 1, line 2. Starting from kair, the baseline jumps up. That may be attributed to the gallows intrusion. Next, the baseline jumps once more up at shar. Once again, probably the effect of gallows intrusion. But then one would expect that the baseline will continue on the level reached at shar. But it does not: it returns to its previous level of kair.

Paragraph 1, Line 5. Why does sairy lean rightwards? Same thing, paragraph 3, line 2, only oksho leans leftwards.

And so on, there are more examples even in this one folio. Note that f1r, by its nature, would be either the very first or the very last folio written in the process of preparing the MS. In both cases, one would expect great care and attention put into its production. And, indeed, it's much more neat and less messy in writing than many other folios. Yet... the baseline jumps.

[attachment=4273]

I am very interested in these baseline jumps, and hope that in the near future it will be possible to analyse this in some automated way. Right now it would be a very large amount of manual work.

The baseline jumps are indeed very interesting. One could assume that they stand for the beginning and the end of a "sequence" (of whatever). These can be single words or several words.