The Voynich Ninja

Further tests on the "truncation effect" in the Voynich manuscript: which is present also in Dante's La Divina Commedia. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(12-05-2023, 02:18 PM)dfs346 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Further thoughts on a possible alphabetic sorting of the glyphs within the Voynich "words" (as implied by Massimiliano Zattera's paper at the Voynich 2022 conference)
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

This is quite interesting for me, because I did a similar experiment in the earlier days of the original Voynich mailing list.
My purpose was to see if sorting the characters in words of any known plain text would reduce the bigram entropy sufficiently to bring it close to Voynichese levels. If I remember correctly, I also alternated vowels and consonants in the
output words in order to create patterns.

I was also concerned about the impact of anagrams, i.e. multiple plain text words mapping to the same pattern, and
found that this hardly happens. This is something that I now understand better, and the reason is included in some of the
conclusions of this page: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
namely that languages like English 'spend' way too many characters in order to distinguish words. This is why such text
can be compressed well.
This would not be the case (at all) if the words were enumerated and replaced by the corresponding number.
It also won't work with Vonichese text.

Finally, the conclusion I had to draw was that such a procedure does not reduce the bigram entropy anywhere near
enough.

I'm not asking rhetorically or as a "gotcha", but shouldn't you be normalizing your samples in terms of number of tokens in the text? As the number of tokens in a text increases, two things will happen: 1) additional types further out in the frequency tail will appear as new hapax, and 2) additional occurrences of prior hapax will appear, removing them as hapax. It's not obvious that those two effects should/do cancel each out. (An obvious test would be to compute the percentage of hapax types for the first N words in the Divine Comedy as a function of increasing N.)

Thoughts on the possible presence of doubled glyphs in the Voynich manuscript, and a comparison with doubled letters in some European languages. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Thoughts on medieval Latin as one of the underlying languages of the Voynich manuscript: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Further thoughts on abbreviated Latin as one of the source languages of the Voynich manuscript: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Another experiment in transliteration of the Voynich manuscript, restoring the glyphs "I" and "C" and breaking up the glyph "2". You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Thoughts on Voynich and the Auchinleck Manuscript You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

---

Thoughts on Voynich and Ashmole 61 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(12-06-2023, 07:52 PM)dfs346 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thoughts on Voynich and the Auchinleck Manuscript You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

---

Thoughts on Voynich and Ashmole 61 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

If you're looking for a corpus of machine readable material in Middle English, check out You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

-- Karl

Thoughts on Old Bohemian as a possible underlying language of the Voynich manuscript. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.