The Voynich Ninja

Roughly 95% of vords (tokens) having at least two EVA characters preceding benched gallows have a 'h' or 'q' among them.

Examples:
6r.13 qocThol
6v.2 chcKhy
6v.3 oochocKhy
6v.4 ShcKhy
6v.6 ShocThol chocTHhy
6v.15 chocKhy

First exception:
9v.5 olcFholy: no 'h', no 'q' before 'cFh'

(28-09-2021, 02:38 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Roughly 95% of vords having at least two characters preceding a benched gallows have a 'h' or 'q' among them.

Examples:
6r.13 qocThol
6v.2 chcKhy
6v.3 oochocKhy
6v.4 ShcKhy
6v.6 ShocThol chocTHhy
6v.15 chocKhy

First exception:
9v.5 olcFholy: no 'h', no 'q' before 'cFh'

Thanks for sharing!  As to that first exception, it looks as though [ol] followed by a benched gallows is pretty common, but almost always with a space inserted -- so I wonder whether it might be the spacing of [olcFholy] that's exceptional here rather than the glyph sequence as such.  Of course, if it were [ol.cFholy] it wouldn't have fit your criteria, and so wouldn't violate the pattern.

I recently noticed one other curious pattern involving benched gallows preceded by [ch] or [Sh] (with apologies if this is already old news).  If we calculate the probability that any given token of [ch] or [Sh] will be followed by [cKh] or [cTh], we get:

ch>cKh (243 tokens, 2.39%), ch>cTh (134 tokens, 1.32%), Sh>cKh (95 tokens, 2.23%), Sh>cTh (50 tokens, 1.17%)

But if we do the same for [n.ch/Sh] or [y.ch/Sh], we get:

n.ch>cKh (96 tokens, 7.46%), n.ch>cTh (46 tokens, 3.57%), n.Sh>cKh (38 tokens, 5.74%), n.Sh>cTh (17 tokens, 2.57%)
y.ch>cKh (77 tokens, 4.20%), y.ch>cTh (38 tokens, 2.07%), y.Sh>cKh (34 tokens, 4.10%), y.Sh>cTh (15 tokens, 1.81%)

In other words, when [n] or [y] precedes [ch] or [Sh], the likelihood of a benched gallows coming next in the sequence seems to increase, and to increase a good deal more for [n] than for [y], which implies that the issue isn't merely whether the [ch] or [Sh] is vord-initial.  It looks like this might also be true for [cho] and [Sho], but the total glyph counts are so low for those combinations that it's harder to tell whether the differences are meaningful.

(PS. The counts I cite for y.ch>cKh and y.ch>cTh actually include one unspaced token apiece, as ych>cKh and ych>cTh; with spaces the token counts would be 76 and 37.  But whether we include these or not doesn't much affect the percentages.)

Hello Patrick,

I'm puzzled by your notations:
ch>cKh (243 tokens): If it is ch before cKh in the same word, there should be more.
n.ch>cKh (77 tokens): Why n? It never precedes cKh. I don't understand.

An argument from "glyphhood" of benches and [qo]? Add some uncertain spaces, and you have a pretty neat rule that benched gallows are preceded by at most one glyph in the vast majority of cases.

My suspicion has long been that the 'c..h' in benched gallows is u or v in the plaintext, simply because qu was one of the few cryptographic tells that pre-1450 codemakers would like to conceal.

(28-09-2021, 07:18 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hello Patrick,

I'm puzzled by your notations:
ch>cKh (243 tokens): If it is ch before cKh in the same word, there should be more.
n.ch>cKh (77 tokens): Why n? It never precedes cKh. I don't understand.

I'm sorry for not explaining my notations clearly.  Let me try this again.

The ">" is a symbol I've been using to distinguish transitional probabilities from bigrams -- i.e., the probability of the part before the ">" being followed by the part after the ">."

By "ch>cKh" I mean the condition or likelihood of any [ch] being followed immediately by [cKh], and not just that [cKh] occurs somewhere later in the same vord.  That is, for all 10177 tokens of [ch], 243 of them (or 2.39%) are followed immediately by [cKh]; hence, after any given token of [ch] there's a 2.39% chance the next glyph(s) will be [cKh].  This is based on ZL_ivtff_1r.txt and limited to text in paragraphs (no labels, radii, circles, etc.).

By "n.ch," I mean the sequence [n] followed by [ch], as an n-gram.  I inserted the period to reflect the fact that when [n] is followed by [ch] there's almost always a space inserted between, but maybe it would have been better to write "n,ch" to acknowledge the handful of exceptions.  In any case, I count 1287 total tokens of [n.ch], [nch], and [n,ch].

By "n.ch>cKh" I then mean the condition or likelihood of a token of [n,ch] being followed in turn by [cKh].  I count 96 instances like this.  So given any token of the sequence [n,ch], the probability of the next glyph(s) being [cKh] is 7.46%.

So what I meant to point out was that, if we disregard spaces, the likelihood of [ch] or [Sh] being followed by a benched gallows appears to go up if the [ch] or [Sh] is preceded in turn by [n] or [y].

I hadn't checked the specific probabilities of [.ch] and [.Sh] being followed by benched gallows (i.e., cases in which [ch] or [Sh] is vord-initial but not line-initial).  Easy enough to do, however.  I count 5063 tokens of [.ch], 226 tokens (4.46%) of [.chcKh], and 119 tokens (2.35%) of [.chcTh]; and 2606 tokens of [.Sh], 86 tokens (3.30%) of [.ShcKh], and 44 tokens (1.69%) of [.ShcTh].  These are all fairly close to the percentages associated with a preceding [y].

But the percentages associated with a preceding [n] are still noticeably higher.  So it looks as though a vord beginning [ch] or [Sh] is significantly more likely to continue with [cKh] or [cTh] if it's preceded by a vord ending in [n] than it is otherwise.  Again, apologies if this is old news.