The Voynich Ninja

But daiin is not d + ain. It is d + aiin

I think of it like this... an/ain/aiin/aiiin and on/oin/oiin/oiiin (with a variety of glyphs in front of the patterns).

I think (hope) it might be easier to figure out what daiin is if we take a step back and look at the patterns as a whole.

(05-08-2020, 08:04 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.f89r2 has daiin thrice in a row.

I just red few articles from a great Finnish philosopher, and found two sentences that come close to this. Maybe it can give food for thoughts.
"Ajattelun ajattelun ajattelu" and "ajatuksen ajatuksen ajatus"

Those two are prefect and regular, albeit funny, Finnish language sentences. 
Meaning freely translated something like "thinking thinking of thinking" and "thought of thought of a thought".
It is possible same pattern to generate many other three or possibly even four word constructs.

Just for the interest.

(05-08-2020, 09:57 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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.

I must say, it was pretty thrilling to read Koen's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. this summer about his experiment with ngrams, where one of the end results was some solid support for each in the series "a + 0~3i + line glyph" being one grapheme. I've been waiting for an experiment like that identifies ngrams with a high likelihood of being single graphemes ever since I read your old blog post about Janus pairs. I smell a breakthrough. I digress.

If indeed the VMs is an encoding of a natural written language plaintext, and if indeed "aiin" is one letter, that would make "daiin" likely to represent a two-letter word or abbreviation. It might be worthwhile to ask ourselves what common two-letter words or abbreviations, in any of the written languages of the time and place of the VMs's creation, are not uncommonly (but not usually) found reduplicated in written texts? "Etc.", comes immediately to mind, though it's three letters. But I give this only as an example of the type of pattern to look for. This is making a lot of assumptions, though, not least of which is that the VMs author spelled and/or abbreviated words (prior to and apart from encrypting them) in a known standard way.

@Scarecrow

Have a look at this thread: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

@RenegadeHealer

The etc is an interesting option, it possibly fits reduplications (&c &c &c), but &c would not be expected at paragraph starts, while according to the VQP, there are five daiins at paragraph starts. It makes sense to have a closer look at all of them (labels may be treated as such), I've found one, it's f108v, not unanimously a paragraph start, but looks so, insofar it's marked with a star.

About entropy, it's longe been hinted that letters may be sorted within vords, although it's unclear in accordance to which rule.

For a quick mind experiment, suppose there's a 1:1 letter to glyph match, so daiin is a mapping of a five-letter word. Of all relevant languages, German is my candidate number one for the language of the underlay message, so let's take German. And suppose that the rule sorts consonants first and vowels second. That would roughy "explain" the positional groupings. Supposing i, l, r, n, m and g are vowels (which nicely fits six vowels of the Latin alphabet), daiin must be an extremely common five-letter German word with three vowels in it, and two vowels of those are the same. Looking at the German word frequency table, we find that such word is "seine". This very nicely fits the very frequent vord dain as well, since by omitting one e from seine we get sein, which is also a very frequent German word. Stopping here we could run and write an article for one of peer-reviewed journals about the new solution. But things get more difficult from here, because next to that we also have daiiin, which although not very frequent, nonetheless has 32 occurrences, so it must be reckoned with. We'll fail to find a single German word with three e's along with s, n and i. So we'd need to decide that it must be two words, something like "ein See" - many plants grow by lakes, don't they? Next we have odaiin, which mustn't be neglected since it's the most frequent "nightside"  Voynich star, and second most frequent overall. In our bold scheme, odaiin would have to be an anagram of seine plus one more consonant (different from s or n), so I could suggest something like eisern or Steine, while gradually understanding that perhaps I'm not on the altogether right track.

One should also consider the clay relatives.
In books from the 1400s, for example, an "s" becomes a "z" quickly.  A nice example is the "S" tone. Written ( dz, das, daz, datz, )
Sounds like "t/d, p/b, c/k, v/f, v/w, i/y" here you don't take it too seriously in the spelling.

Thank you @Anton, do you mean I should move my remark there?

My point was related to "daiin daiin daiin" specifically, because the words are yes repeated but each of them have a different lexical meaning. 
They are not form of reduplication, they do not stress/intesify the point like Dante, not making a plural, not connected to each other.
I thin they are a different phenomenon, but I am no expert, but they do not fit with Emma's other valid sounding 5 points either, and they are not causes of dittography or haplography naturally.



Dain=Ajattelu (meaning 3, but maybe Voynichese needed quokedy to disambiguate in from meaning 1, or negate or anything else)

(15-09-2020, 06:51 AM)Scarecrow Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thank you @Anton, do you mean I should move my remark there?

No, just a reference for the thread where we had a similar discussion and saw that even six repetitions in a row would not be something impossible.

Re daiin, here's is an interesting test. Locate a word in any more or less relevant language (Latin, German, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, whatever) which:

a) is quite frequent
b) forms another valid word when duplicated

That would be a potential match for daiin.

(14-09-2020, 01:30 PM)Scarecrow Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(05-08-2020, 08:04 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.f89r2 has daiin thrice in a row.

I just red few articles from a great Finnish philosopher, and found two sentences that come close to this. Maybe it can give food for thoughts.
"Ajattelun ajattelun ajattelu" and "ajatuksen ajatuksen ajatus"

Those two are prefect and regular, albeit funny, Finnish language sentences. 
Meaning freely translated something like "thinking thinking of thinking" and "thought of thought of a thought".
It is possible same pattern to generate many other three or possibly even four word constructs.

Just for the interest.

Could you explain the grammar, morphology, and syntax of these sentences in more detail, please? I have studied some Finnish as well as Uralic linguistics, so I think (the thought of thinking) that I will be able to follow your explanations.

Finnish is well known for its alliteration, most famously in the Kalevala (e.g., "aivoni ajattelevi"), but even in the predilection of Finnish parents for naming their children alliteratively: One family tree in a Finnish textbook includes such sets of siblings as Aada, Atte, Aaro; Ella, Eetu, Elina; Liisa, Lassi; and Jaakko, Jorma. (It even extends this pattern to a couple married couples, Hannu & Helena and Jorma & Janita, but I hope this is not an actual factor in Finnish mate selection!)

(14-09-2020, 03:32 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(05-08-2020, 09:57 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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.

I must say, it was pretty thrilling to read Koen's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. this summer about his experiment with ngrams, where one of the end results was some solid support for each in the series "a + 0~3i + line glyph" being one grapheme. I've been waiting for an experiment like that identifies ngrams with a high likelihood of being single graphemes ever since I read your old blog post about Janus pairs. I smell a breakthrough. I digress.

If indeed the VMs is an encoding of a natural written language plaintext, and if indeed "aiin" is one letter, that would make "daiin" likely to represent a two-letter word or abbreviation. It might be worthwhile to ask ourselves what common two-letter words or abbreviations, in any of the written languages of the time and place of the VMs's creation, are not uncommonly (but not usually) found reduplicated in written texts? "Etc.", comes immediately to mind, though it's three letters. But I give this only as an example of the type of pattern to look for. This is making a lot of assumptions, though, not least of which is that the VMs author spelled and/or abbreviated words (prior to and apart from encrypting them) in a known standard way.

Indeed, Koen's blog post that you link to above is fascinating. (It should be noted that Marco contributed significantly to the results there as well.) Has that particular topic been discussed in its own thread on this forum?

Summary of the main result of Koen's blog post for those who don't have the time or inclination to wade through it:

If one selectively considers each of the following character groups as a single character or letter, one transforms the ms text such that both its "h1" character entropy and its "h2" conditional character entropy (one critical problem with the Voynich ms text) are much more in line with typical h1 and h2 values of many natural language texts, in particular for European languages:

[ch], [sh]
[ain], [aiin], [aiiin]
[air], [ar], [al], [am]
[or], [ol]
[ok], [ot], [od]
[qo], [qok], [qot]

These substitutions -- treating each of the above character groups as a single character or letter -- generate an "h2" conditional character entropy of 3.01 and an "h1" character entropy of 4.12, which are actually within the normal range for many European natural language texts.