The Voynich Ninja

Hi everyone, hope you're all having a good holiday time etc,

I've recently been thinking/posting a lot about Q20's bifolio nesting/ordering, and as part of that have revisited the suggestion that f58r/f58v might have been the original first two pages of Q20. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

However, one thing that emerged from this is that the text on f58r/v is really rather unusual: as examples, you can look at “alal”, "alol", "olal", and "okal", all of which are to be found more often on f58 than on any other single folio. ("arar" is tied with f85r1.) Similarly, f58's fraction of "ed-" words is more than A pages (which have almost none), but much lower than typical B pages. Also quite unlike the Q13/Q20 B pages, f58 has only a single word where the first glyph is "l".

I'm therefore wondering whether f58 might turn out to be a key language page, kind of mid-point in the evolution between Currier A and Currier B.

Has anyone looked specifically at text oddities of f58? I've trawled the web but haven't found anything, but perhaps this is one of those topics that people here have seen things for themselves but not got round to mentioning.

Cheers, Nick

I distinctly remember from the time that I did the collaborative transliteration with Gabriel Landini, that I found the 'language', or perhaps rather 'patterns', of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. particularly interesting.
Having just gone through the herbal pages with the alternating Currier A and B languages, this felt different, though more similar to B than to A.

At the time, I was still suspecting that the (more-or-less) cleartext on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was a translator's attempt to convert a piece of Voynich text to plaintext, and we just needed to find a case of "aror sheey" in the MS to locate that piece. Ideally, the character translations would match the readable part of the alphabet on f1r, and then the case would be settled. Of course, that did not happen.
However, when going through these two pages, I had this hunch that this was quite "aror sheey" like language.
(I believe there is one occurrence of these two words in Q20 somewhere, but that also has not led to any such matching).

Indeed, as Nick indicates on the linked page, I have long had a feeling that there is a 'transition language'.
The clearest evidence (to me) is a tiny detail in one of the plots I recently did again for my conference talk.

It is shown below.

[attachment=7115]

This shows the fraction of "ed" bigrams over the pages. The light grey crosses are the zodiac pages, which we know are in the right order, and should realistically be of similar subject matter. Here we see the "ed" bigram count increase from zero to something distinctly non-zero.
The zodiac pages consist of circular text and labels, and the vast majority of these bigrams occur in the circular text, where also the increase is being observed. However, the increase is also seen in the labels. In the early signs, they do not occur. In the later signs they start to appear.

Now where are You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in this scheme? Unfortunately, right now I suspect that these pages were labeled (by me) as text-only, and they are not part of these plots at all. I will look into that in order to check. In any case, in the update of the ZL and GC files I did the other day, I had just re-labeled them as "pages with marginal stars", so it will be very easy to include them now.

There is more about You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which is on a different topic, so I will write that in a different thread.

A couple of years ago, I was inspired by Rene and Lisa's research to post CUVA bigram diagrams. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., based on the seven CUVA bigrams ED OL DY SO HO OR EO, is probably the most informative; this was also inspired by something Rene did, IIRC. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows diagrams for individual bigrams and details the color codes I used.

Indeed f58 is at a centre of a small cluster of folios at the centre of the PCA diagram: according to this graph, it can be seeen as being "mid-point". This small cluster is surrounded by a large CurrierA cloud at the bottom left, a large Currier B cloud at the top left and a (mostly) Pharmacese cloud on the right. This smaller cloud is made of 6 folios (58, 70, 51, 67, 68, 69 - the label for the red square 51 is obscured by the other overlapping folios) by three different scribes: s3 f58, s1 f51, s4 the other four folios.

Of course, PCA does not show the details. If one looks at the individual plots, these six folios are sometimes rather distant from each other.

These are the top ten closest folios based on PC1 and PC2 (Euclidean distance):

scribe f Section distance
4 70 ZodAstr 0.347
1 51 Botanic 0.370
4 67 ZodAstr 0.724
4 68 ZodAstr 0.783
4 69 ZodAstr 0.900
1 89 Recipes 2.086
1 44 Botanic 2.368
1 90 Botanic 2.676
1 53 Botanic 2.771
1 87 Botanic 3.007

I also redid the plot including You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f58v.
Left is the 'bigram fractions' plot using the ZL file and Cuva1, which was introduced during my talk, and is very similar to Cuva. Right is the same plot with the two pages of interest in dark blue, just after the herbal section, essentially in the middle of the horizontal scale. (Users with a narrow screen may not see the plots next to each other, but below each other).

[attachment=7117]  [attachment=7118]

These two marks tend to align most with the pharmaceutical text (yellow crosses) and the "ed" fraction is lower than that of all of the zodiac section, which I mentioned in the earlier post.
Here is also the PCA-type plot.

[attachment=7119]

In one view, the two points are quite separate from the 'Q20 cloud' (dark blue) and in the other, one overlaps.
The two pages appear relatively far away from each other in the horizontal direction.

Hi Nick!
I'm glad you wrote on the forum, you are rare here.
A few days ago I tried to comment on your blog, but my comment was not accepted.

I was wondering what lies on the other side of f58 ?

What does it look like if I just move the whole sheet and how does that affect the book?

[attachment=7120]
From Rene's side

(26-12-2022, 09:02 PM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm therefore wondering whether f58 might turn out to be a key language page, kind of mid-point in the evolution between Currier A and Currier B.

Has anyone looked specifically at text oddities of f58?

For what it's worth, I'd pegged the whole bifolio f58+f65 as falling into a transitional category based on which glyphs most often follow [Sh], [d], and [e] -- a measure I was You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  In the scheme shown below, "e+" means any quantity of [e].  

1. Sh>o / d>a / e>y: 1+8, 2+7, 9+16, 11+14, 13, 18+23, 25+32, 27+30, 35+38, 36+37, 42+47, 44+45
2. Sh>o / d>a / e>o tied with e>y: 10+15, 49+56
3. Sh>o / d>a / e>o: 3+6, 4+5, 17+24, 19+22, 20+21, 28+29, 51+54, 52+53, 93+96
4. Sh>e+ / d>a / e>o: 58+65, 87+90, 88+89, 100+101
5. Sh>e+ / d>y / e>o: 57+66, 99+102
6. Sh>e+ / d>y / e>d (standard “Currier B”): everything else

I hadn't (and still haven't) run these statistics for f58 by itself; partly I was hoping that by analyzing whole bifolios I'd cut down on the amount of statistical noise.  Still, this is yet another metric by which its bifolio (at least) seems to fall somewhere in between the two Currier languages, if we think of the one as potentially "evolving" into the other: Sh>e+ has overtaken the Sh>o characteristic of Currier A, but d>y hasn't yet overtaken d>a and e>d hasn't yet overtaken e>o as we ordinarily see with Currier B.

Hi Ruby, I previously found Voynich.ninja moderation unsatisfactory, so am only a rare participant here. Cipher Mysteries autoblocks posts with links, so you may possibly have included a link? The trick is to remove the :// part from your link, and I'll reassemble it during moderation. Cheers, Nick

(27-12-2022, 04:05 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This shows the fraction of "ed" bigrams over the pages. The light grey crosses are the zodiac pages, which we know are in the right order, and should realistically be of similar subject matter. Here we see the "ed" bigram count increase from zero to something distinctly non-zero.
The zodiac pages consist of circular text and labels, and the vast majority of these bigrams occur in the circular text, where also the increase is being observed. However, the increase is also seen in the labels. In the early signs, they do not occur. In the later signs they start to appear.

I guess the big question is whether there is a different feature that decreases as the ed bigram count increases.

(27-12-2022, 02:18 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What does it look like if I just move the whole sheet and how does that affect the book

f58 is attached to f65, which is a Herbal-B folio with some scratchy-looking writing. The expectation would broadly be that the bifolio got 'flipped over', i.e. that f65 would have preceded f58, so that f58 would have ended up as the end of a quire/gathering, leading on into (say) Q20.