The Voynich Ninja

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Here is the appendix to (P) on page 57v.
But where are the signs (a + c)?

You believe what you see, but you do not think.
Unfortunately, I cannot attach any weight to your findings.

And while I'm at it, who is Glen Claston Glen Claston ?

I already discussed the glyphs at Bax in 2016.
It tells me it's all repetitive. Only a few things are really new.

Glen Claston, obituary here:
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"[He] devised a transliteration alphabet which he called Voynich 101" contains approx. 255 glyphs.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  : v101

Glen Claston's meticulous work on the transliteration, with that enormous amount of glyphs, shows that we are not dealing with an alphabet but with something else.

Questions about the glyph set are endless. In order to do any research at all – other than on questions about the glyph set – it is necessary to make assumptions.

I note how Marco and Emma May dealt with this matter in their joint paper on work-breaks:

The script comprises a number of distinct glyphs but also some which may be ligatures of others. Many glyphs are rare and some are unique. The majority of the text is written with a smaller subset of glyphs which occur more than fifty times. The number of glyphs in this subset differs according to the researcher, with counts ranging from 18 to 29 glyphs… 

For the purposes of this paper we adopt the definition of a glyph as a stroke or set of strokes which are typically contiguous while also being usually separated from other strokes or glyphs. This allows for a set of glyphs to be constructed visually without an underlying theory on the working of the script.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. include several works related to the issues of transliteration, word morphology and higher structure (e.g. word order / line grammar).
Rene discusses new progress in processable transliterations. Alexander Boxer will discuss his new transliteration and some aspects of word order (e.g. token repetition).
Massimiliano Zattera's paper is about both transliteration and morphology.

Quote:The question of which glyphs are actual single Voynich characters is still very open; its correct answer will greatly impact statistical analysis of the text and will guide deciphering attempts. This research uses a computational approach, including machine learning techniques, to create a new transliteration alphabet.
...
This alphabet has been used by an optimization algorithm to automatically produce a formal grammar for words in the Voynich. This grammar is the one with the highest F1 score among those surveyed.
...

I like the idea of applying the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to this problem. This measure takes into account the ability of the method to both detect correct samples (words from a Voynich transliteration, in this case) and reject incorrect samples (non-Voynichese words). I think a similar approach could usefully be applied to a grammar of Voynichese lines: such grammar should accept actual lines and reject members of a set of non-Voynichese lines.

I am curious to see how Zattera tackled the problem of creating the set of negative samples: likely there are well-established ways to do so in the context of computational linguistics, but this is something I have not investigated. When I did something similar to compare Stolfi's and Emma's word-grammars, I scrambled characters in Voynichese words and created a set of the scrambled results that do not occur in the manuscript; I also included a set of English words filtering out the few that occur in EVA (e.g. 'do', 'chain') and those that contain characters that are absent or very rare in EVA (e.g. 'b', 'w'). When investigating line-grammar, negative cases could be created by swapping words in a Voynichese line.

I would say that the majority of the other papers at Malta are more or less related with aspects of Voynichese "grammar". I am sure that we will have much to digest and discuss after the conference...

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To Glen Claston
Although I have worked with his data often and for years, I did not have the name in my head. Perhaps I too should read more again.

I use his work to split glyphs and integrate them into a combination system.
When you bring some order into the system, details can be explained better.

Old contribution to a possible combination system.

To make a combination alphabet, the list has to go up to about 22, if I take out the rarely used letters. Example (w,j,z, and maybe x, y, or k) depending on the language.

In the example above, there are possibilities from 1-6, but I still have (o,a,c, and something like a loop) in the VM. And others.

Marco wrote:

"Showing similar lists in actual medieval manuscripts, or at least actual books of any kind, would clarify the point being made"

The quest for a precedent for what I imagine the Voynich text might be goes on.

Needless to say I struggle to find anything remotely like it.

So I am forced back upon the possibility that the Voynich text is a singular creation.

While it is not as weird as some suppose – it is not from-another-planet weird – it is singular in many respects, and we struggle to find precedents for many aspects of the text. By any estimation, it is an outlier.

So we must leave open the possibility that it is a type of text without precedent.

Regarding this, I am again drawn to passages in the natural scientific works of Nicholas of Cusa where – conversing with a ‘Layman’ -  he foreshadows a totally new way of assessing natural resources and a totally new type of book recording the same:

Orator: You have now explained sufficiently the reasons why you wish for the weights of things to be measured by means of a weight-scale and to be recorded both serially and multiply. For, indeed, we see that that book would be very useful. And we see that the under-taking of it by great men ought to be urged, so that in different
provinces [experimental weights] would be registered and would be collected into one [book], so that we would more readily be brought
to many things that are [now] hidden to us. And I will not cease everywhere to promote its being done.

Layman: If you care for me, then be diligent [in this task]

In the absence of any tangible examples of an inventory such as I suggest the Voynich may be, I can point to literary foreshadowings of such an experimental type of work.

As it happened, Cusanus’ approach to the natural sciences went nowhere and the type of text envisaged in this passage did not proliferate. There might have been but one attempt at it.

More generally, in defense of my position, when we have finally translated nearly every weird, mysterious, arcane text in history it is almost always an inventory or similiar. What did we find in heiroglyphs, cuneiform etc? Tax records. The earliest writings were inventories and records.

In this case too it seems more likely to me that the Voynich is some form of inventory than it is a philosophical or medical treatise. There is strong evidence, anyway, that it is not the prose it appears to be. If not prose, then what? Similarly confounding texts in history have disappointed and turned out to be inventories.

(17-11-2022, 10:38 PM)Hermes777 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In this case too it seems more likely to me that the Voynich is some form of inventory than it is a philosophical or medical treatise. There is strong evidence, anyway, that it is not the prose it appears to be. If not prose, then what? Similarly confounding texts in history have disappointed and turned out to be inventories.

Some of the most interesting inventories are dictionaries, word-lists, glossaries, and grammars. The text of the Donatus has something of a whiff of Voynichese about it: