The Voynich Ninja

(16-11-2022, 05:55 PM)MichelleL11 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.At the risk of either stating the obvious or otherwise not contributing:

A logical explanation is that the gallows don't function the same each time they are used.  Certainly the idea of classifying a word differently depending on whether it exists only with or both with and without a gallows has been suggested before (e.g. the nebulous Grove words).  

Is it possible that the actual function of the gallows changes and that change can been seen depending on whether it is a "necessary" component of word to make it a "valid" Voynichese word as compared to a component that can be placed anywhere within an otherwise "valid word"?

I'm sure it is not lost on anyone that the second of these two "functions," actually a non-function, is a null.

Is there some way to test whether the possible function of gallows that move within otherwise "valid" words is acting as a null?

I’ll take the risk of contributing even less than you, and just point out that in Cham & Jackson’s Curve-Line System for breaking down Voynichese, gallows are “invisible” — non-entities, essentially, which have no effect on a vord’s behavior and parsing by this system.

The Curve-Line Paradigm, as I understand it, was posited to explain the basic design of the writing or notation system. Its application and relevance to finding meaningful content encoded by this system is not clear, and my understanding is that Cham & Jackson appear to lean towards a meaningless, stochastically generated pseudotext being most likely.

But meaningful or not, my point is that nablator’s concept of the Floating Gallows meshes surprisingly nicely with Cham & Jackson’s place for the gallows character in their system for breaking down Voynichese: its presence and exact placement appears to be an independent variable, neither constrained by, nor having any influence over, the arrangement of all the other characters in a vord.

(17-11-2022, 12:44 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I’ll take the risk of contributing even less than you, and just point out that in Cham & Jackson’s Curve-Line System for breaking down Voynichese, gallows are “invisible” — non-entities, essentially, which have no effect on a vord’s behavior and parsing by this system.

Yes, thank you for mentioning the CLS, it is one of the factors that led me to believe that gallows are inserted, along with the widespread variability in insertion points of course.  A few months ago I almost created a thread about moving gallows, with statistics, but decided against it. I hoped to find similarities or spikes in frequencies that could suggest equivalent forms in a predictable way, but the correlations are not very good and the numbers are too low.

12 qokchor 
1 qocThor
15 qotchor
1 qocKhor

142 chdy
13 tchdy
20 kchdy
9 pchdy
3 fchdy

506 chedy
34 tchedy
21 kchedy
11 fchedy
35 pchedy
4 cKhedy
11 cThedy
5 cPhedy
1 cFhedy
5 chkedy
2 chtedy

...

(17-11-2022, 03:25 AM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.inserted either as [tch]/[kch] or [cTh]/[cKh]

pfeaster, as an aside, what are your thoughts on the idea that [tch] and [kch] might be equivalent to [cTh] and [cKh], respectively? I was much taken by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about the possibility that [f] and [p] might be nothing more than top-line-of-paragraph variations of [ke] and [te]. But this spurred me to play around on Voynichese.com, to see if I could find any relationship between vords containing [cKh]/[cTh], and otherwise identical vords containing [kch]/[tch] in their place. I'm a ham-fisted statistician and I didn't tabulate my results systematically, I'm sorry to say. But I do remember this: discounting Grove words, the benched and unbenched varieties of each vord, as I just defined these, seemed to be roughly equally as likely to occur.

nablator, do you make anything of the mildly astounding statistic that almost exactly half of all tokens contain a gallows, and half don't? I remember discovering this while playing around on Voynichese.com after reading about (and being more than mildly astounded by!) the bimodal distribution of vords by length.

(17-11-2022, 02:57 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.nablator, do you make anything of the mildly astounding statistic that almost exactly half of all tokens contain a gallows, and half don't?

Yes, but my interpretation will be in another thread.

A teaser, to answer your question:
Since k/t gallows seem to work like some optional binary marks (I'm ignoring p/f for the moment because they are so unevenly distributed, unlike k/t) there is a possible good reason for marking about half of the words: it is to signal de-synchronization from a binary state. Imagine that each vord needs a binary state information to make sense (one ciphertext for two cleartexts). There is a 50% probability that the correct state can be deduced from the context with whatever rule is implemented, for example (not the rule that I will present in the other thread): keep the same state as the previous vord, or (better) alternate to make reduplication possible without reduplication in the cleartext.

One type of mark would be enough to re-synchronize the stream (this role was actually held by double space) but two are easier to manage, giving the correct state information, thus the evolution and insertion of k/t as disambiguation marks.

The system initially required double spaces, that were unpractical on line breaks, and could be lost or added to justify text on the left and right. They were mostly replaced and made obsolete by k/t gallows, that also made the text much more language-like. I hope to show evidence in the other thread that there are still remainders of this evolution in the artificial-looking uneven spacing.

(16-11-2022, 08:52 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So we see that [lchey] exists (and is very common) but [clhey], [chley], and [chely] don't exist and [cheyl] has one token, so assume that the form [Xchey] is not the same as [cXhey] (or other). Now, [l] isn't a gallows, I know, but it forms part of the information we use to understand word structure. We would otherwise be stating that the [chey] in [lchey] is not the same as the [chey] in [kchey]. But is that any better (or worse) than saying that the [chey] in [Xchey] is not the same as [cXhey]?

That's a helpful way of expressing it.  When we judge whether a word contains [AB] as an element, what potential forms of elaboration should we consider: only [XAB] and [ABX], or also [AXB]?  Of course the latter model could be tested for any glyph, and not just gallows.  The words [chol] (316) and [lchol] (4) seem to contain [cho] plus one or two tokens of [l], but what about [chlol] (1) and [chllo] (1)?

Benched gallows are probably the least avoidable case of some apparent [AB] (the [c] and [h] pieces of the bench) and [X] (the gallows) being combined as [AXB] -- if indeed that's what's happening there.  If so, the existence of one such case might support the idea of searching for others, particularly with regard to gallows.

As RenegadeHealer points out, the "transparency" of gallows in the curve-line system would dovetail nicely with a model in which gallows are inserted into preexisting word structures.  So might limits on the maximum amount of mantle in a word.  If the mantle can be of a certain length, but no longer, and can then have a gallows inserted into it somewhere, that would be one way to account for us not seeing words that simultaneously have long mantle sections on both sides of a gallows.  I believe mantle lengths top out at --

2 0.00013 ..cheee#ch.......
3 0.00152 ..cheec#he.......
1 0.00051 ..cheec#hee......

-- while words that have less mantle before the gallows can extend the mantle further rightward past it:

2 0.00013 ....che#chee.....
5 0.00033 .....ch#chee.....
2 0.00013 .....ch#chch.....
2 0.00013 .......#cheee....
2 0.00013 .......#echee....
6 0.00040 .......#eeche....
1 0.00007 .......#chche....
6 0.00040 .......#chech....

(16-11-2022, 08:52 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The question is whether these assumptions about analogising word structure are correct and whether they've been adequately tested. I think your hypothesis is a good challenge and, while I believe we have the word structure broadly correct, I'm not sure we can prove it in every instance. Can we break down the question about word structure and gallows insertion into smaller parts?

Rene made one suggestion for subdividing it into two separate "mysteries," which it might be possible to tackle separately.  Is that the sort of thing you have in mind?

I must say I am very curious about your oncoming thread now, nablator.

I’m very much looking forward to reading that upcoming post, nablator. I think I see what you’re saying. A gallows character might be a sign for specifying which of two possible encryption keys to use for decoding the vord. If the vord contains no gallows, use the encryption key indicated by the most recent gallows. Or, perhaps there is some degree of overlap between the two keys, such that one vord has the same meaning in both keys, making a gallows unnecessary.

I compare this almost to the linguistic concept of code switching, wherein speakers mix two different languages that are both understood by all participants. In transcribing code-switched speech verbatim, writers will sometimes italicize all of the words of one language, and none of the other, so as to avoid confusing readers/ listeners who do not code switch in this way, and might have a hard time realizing that two different languages are being mixed. Now, if a person code-switches between two related languages that have a good deal of lexical similarity, then for  some words it won’t matter whether they’re italicized or not, because they mean roughly the same thing in both languages.

(17-11-2022, 02:57 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.pfeaster, as an aside, what are your thoughts on the idea that [tch] and [kch] might be equivalent to [cTh] and [cKh], respectively? I was much taken by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about the possibility that [f] and [p] might be nothing more than top-line-of-paragraph variations of [ke] and [te]. 

Based just on a comparison of word frequencies, I'd think [t] and [k] are more likely to be equivalent to each other than [kch] is to [cKh] and [tch] to [cTh].  Consider:

• [chcKhy] 123 and [chcThy] 70, versus [chkchy] 5 and [chtchy] 3
  
• [qocKhy] 18 and [qocThy] 8, versus [qokchy] 60 and [qotchy] 60
  

Beyond that, my gut feeling is that [kch] is probably as distinct from [cKh] as [ko] is from [ok] -- but I don't have a strong opinion and am weighing in only because you asked. 

The idea that [p] could represent [te] is an attractive way of trying to account for the rarity of [pe].  But if [p] = [te], then wouldn't [tee] = [pe], and if so, shouldn't [pe] still occur fairly frequently?  I suppose one of Aga Tentakulus's [p] variants could represent [te], and another [tee], but that feels like clutching at straws.