(04-10-2020, 12:09 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (03-10-2020, 06:11 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Some stars have no labels, therefore it is not necessary for every star to have a meaningful label
Exactly, but it is as well not necessary for every star to have a meaningless label. However, the scribe took effort to label all stars in f68r1, while he left many stars unlabeled in f68r2.
I don't see that as a problem, maybe he couldn't be bothered to label all the stars on f68r2 You might ask if he wasn't going to label them, why did he draw them, maybe to fill available space.
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Anton Wrote:
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(03-10-2020, 06:11 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The reason for having meaningless labels is to confuse the person trying to break the cipher
With labels, it's a way to confuse one's own self. It's not to be forgotten that writing and enciphering is one part. The other part is deciphering and reading. There must be a mechanism then for the reader to distinguish a meaningful label from a meaningless one.
I agree. There has to be some relatively easy way for the reader to determine what is null and what not. This could be some kinds of word formula or formulae by which null words are constructed. It could be that in some case we have null sequences of symbols, so for example EVA-otol could be null and likewise EVA-otolredy equal to EVA-redy.
Anton Wrote:
No, while (as I said) I'm not familiar with what grounds you build your null-words theory upon, the Voynich stars diagrams do not seem to me to support it out of the box.
Well, that OK. For me it is the explanation that makes most sense for explaining that and a variety of other things. I haven't heard another explanation that I, personally, find more plausible.
Anton Wrote:
Quote:I view rare and distinctly spelled words as being much more likely to be "real" words than very common words with spellings very similar to other very common words
Why?
Well first, if there is a formula(e) that can be used to define null words, as an example all EVA-o#*l words where # is a gallows symbol and * is any symbol, then it makes sense for the null words to be more similar to each other than more different as very different words are less likely to be covered by one formula. In addition it comes down to informational content, distinctly spelled words seem to provide more informational content. Null words like words that are repeated or repeated by one symbol seem to have a lower informational content.
Anton Wrote:
(03-10-2020, 06:11 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Note the repeated labels tend to be spelled very similarly to each other, whereas the "unique" labels tend to be spelled much more differently from one another; this should be statistically verifiable, which is on my list to do.
For the Voynich stars, the obvious similarity for the frequent ones is that they mostly begin with "o". Seven out of nine most frequent Voynich stars begin with "o". Here's the list:
- otol (20,3% of all occurrences)
- odaiin (14,7%)
- otor (10,9%)
- olor (7,2%)
- dchol (5,8%)
- okeor (5,3%)
- okchor (4,6%)
- chodar (3,4%)
- ockhy (3,1%)
There's also morphological similarity between some of them, e.g. otol vs otor vs olor.
However, that holds not only for frequent stars. 72% of all star names begin with "o". There is also morphological similarity for certain rare or unique stars, such as otydy vs otys, okodaly vs okoaly, otcheody vs okcheody vs ofcheody.
The fact that 72% of all stars begin with "o", does not very well agree with the idea of noun denominations. Supposing graphical stars represent a homogenous set of notions, 72% of
names of those notions would not begin with a single letter, unless most of those are null-labels and "o" is a special marker of a null-vord. Furthermore, there are only six starting letters for the Voynich star names on the whole.
The simplest "best-odds" explanation would be an article, something like Arabic "al", which immediately moves out of the realm of simple nouns.
As a general point I said nouns, that does not necessarily mean "simple nouns", I have no problem in principle with an article being included in the name. However, if I am honest, I don't think that is what we see here. Do I think
otol, otor and olor are null? Yes that would be my opinion. My guess is that [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]odaiin is null given that it "daiin" a very common word with an "o" in front. The other words I am not sure about. It could be that in all words that start with an o followed by a gallows one should ignore those first two symbols. I am also comfortable with the possibility that 72% of star names are null; I don't know if that is the case or not, but it is not inconceivable to me.[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]For me it is difficult there are labels/words that I am pretty confident are null and also words I am inclined to think are not null. The difficulty for me is demarcating the ground between the two extremes. So when you point out [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]morphological similarity even amongst words that are less common I have concerns about those quite possibly being nulls. I can entertain the possibility that part of a longer word might be null, that seems conceivable, though if there is morphological similarity to another word it makes it more doubtful to me as we are still left with morphological similarity after shortening. Having looked at stars there are certainly those with distinctive spellings.[/font][/font]
From my perspective producing a formula by which all null words can be defined is the trick, but that is not something I have as yet done. My guess is that it is a more complex formula than all words beginning with "o" are null, though again that is something I am prepared to entertain.
