The Voynich Ninja

I often quickly forget what was discussed in the forum, and, the more surprising, I'm also in habit of forgetting the discussions in which I myself took most active part. So please excuse me if what I write below was discussed earlier, we'll merge the threads then.

I collated two trails of thought from the gallows intrusion thread - first one, that daiin may be used as a meaningless (?) filler (though any other vord may be as well, of course). The second one, that the beginnings and endings of lines may be particular candidate positions to place fillers in.

So I took ten most frequent vords (daiin, as we know, is the first one on that list), and calculated the percentage of occurrences which correspond to the vord 's in question being the first or the last vord of a line.

The results are below (the counts are based on the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). The first number is the total count,  the second number is the count as line-initial, the third number is the count as line-final, and the final number is the percentage of "(line-initial plus line-final)/total".

daiin    864   156   134      33,4%
ol        538     31     47      14,5%
chedy  501       6     38        8,8%
aiin     470       0     34        7,2%
shedy  427       6     20        6,1%
chol     397     19      6        6,3%
or        366     31     20       13,9%
ar        352       5     27        9,1%
chey    344       5     19        7,0%
dar      319      36    47        26,0%


It's seen that daiin exhibits particular (and almost equal) affinity to line beginnings and endings, with one third of its total occurrences being in those positions, while for most other vords of the top ten, excluding only dar, the count does not exceed 15%, and mostly is under 10%.

What about "variations" of daiin, such as dain and daiiin?

dain    211   47   30      36,5%
daiiin    17     2    4       35,3%

That's funny.

I suspect that daiin is a filler indeed, with dain and daiiin being its variations that occupy slightly less and slightly more space, respectively.

What's the figure for all words starting [d] or ending [n]?

If I'm correctly applying the wildcard: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

then it's 1214 total, 236 line start, 207 line end, so the percentage is 36,5%.

This is heavily driven by daiin and dain, because those two account for almost 90% of all things d*n.

However, that's for words starting [d] AND ending [n].

If we want the OR operator, then d* is:

3625 - 730 - 794

and *n is:

6061 - 906 - 697

So cumulative it's 32,3%

But 9686 is already comparable with the total count of 37886 tokens, which means that such words will be present almost in every line, and often expected in line-start or line-end.

I guess that Anton is extracting line-start/end numbers by clicking on "Plot results": another handy feature of the great voynichese.com site.
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Yes, exactly. Very convenient!

Found this little oddity , not sure where to put it , so put it here.

daiin duplication ( TTtranscription ).

Whats curious is that every scribe writes a double-daiin  i.e 'daiin daiin', and that scribes 2,3,4,5 have only done a double-dain once.

Perhaps a double-daiin is more necessary when writing about plants,
  daiin is frequent in the balneo section and even more frequent in the recipes section with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. having the 3rd highest count on a page,
  but each of these sections has only one double-daiin.

Perhaps the other scribes are paying a tip-of-the-hat or an hommage to scribe1 by each writing a double-daiin once and only once,
  i doubt that this is true but it is peculiar enough to make one wonder.

The affinity of daiin to line-start and line-end may be explained by that it is a word that is likely in the start and the end of the line, or that it is the beginning of a word that is likely in the start of the line AND at the same time it is the ending of a word which is likely in the end of the line.

Or some combination of that.

One ready example that I can imagine is the German "der" or "den". As an article, it would be frequent in the beginning of lines (when there's the beginning of a sentence). As a word ending, it would be not infrequent in the end of the lines, because the end of the line is, at the same time, the end of the word which stands in the end of the line. Many words end with "der", like "ander", and many verbs end with "den".

The "derder" duplication would be possible when the sentence ends with -der, and then another sentence immediately starts with the article "der". We discussed such possibilities in the "Sequential repetitions" thread (which is one of the oldest in the forum).

f89r2 has daiin thrice in a row.

Anton Wrote: I often quickly forget what was discussed in the forum, and, the more surprising, I'm also in habit of forgetting the discussions in which I myself took most active part. So please excuse me if what I write below was discussed earlier, we'll merge the threads then.

Not only do I sometimes forget what has been discussed in the past (and even that I was involved in the discussion), but sometimes I forget to come back to a thread that I opened and realized I didn't have time to read.

I'll go into the thread... "Oops, that looks like a long one or one that might take some extra thought, I'll have to come back to it after work"... and then more messages pile up and I forget to return to read it. I can't even remember ever having seen this thread, other than maybe glancing at the first line.


Well, I guess you know how I feel about this subject since I blogged about it recently, although I wasn't looking at "daiin", I was looking at "ain" and "oin". I too think there's a possibility of filler, or maybe a "something-else pattern" based on the shape of a medieval filler pattern, but I am not completely sure because there are other possibilities.

I feel fairly strongly that "ain" should be analyzed without the "d" because there are many glyphs preceding the "ain" sequence. Get a grasp of "ain" first and then look at the letters in front, but not only the "d", the other ones too, so the pattern can be understood in context.