The Voynich Ninja

(13-02-2023, 01:16 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Out of curiosity, and no criticism implied: what exactly do you mean with "TT transliteration" ?

TT_ivtff_v0a on your website.

(09-02-2023, 10:05 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.TLDR: The k/t gallows sequence is strongly biased toward reduplication; especially long sequences of the same k/t gallows in a row.

What is interesting about it is that human-generated pseudo-random sequences have a "tendency to overalternate between outcomes" documented in psychology studies. See for example: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the referenced literature.

Why do we see the opposite tendency in the VMS?

I've also noted those k or t sequences and thought what it may mean, but I concluded that it is false impression that only k and t gallows have such long sequences in a row. I think they caught our eyes because of their tall shape in comparison to the major number of low characters. The text is full of long sequences of ch, sh, o, r, d, etc. They are not so notable in the text, but it doesn't mean that their strings less significant. 
As for me, I didn't consider them as some tricks of the code, I rather see it as a possible literary device. I mean that these repetitions of letters or sounds may be just a sign of literary consonance (including, alliteration) or assonance.

Quote:Consonance is the repetition of the same consonant sounds in a series of closely connected words in a sentence or a phrase. The repeated consonant sounds may occur in any part of the words - beginning, middle or end. Usually, you can identify consonance when you spot that the same sound is repeated in several consecutive words.
...
Alliteration normally means the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of closely connected words in sentences or phrases. In most cases, the repeated sound is a consonant but is sometimes a vowel sound.
Alliteration is when a series of words start with the same sound. It is most commonly found in poetry but you can also find examples in prose, songs, rap, and even in people's names! Alliteration creates a memorable effect on the text, making it more engaging and easier to remember.
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• It can help to focus the reader's attention on a particular section or phrase.
  
• It can create a rhythm when reading something aloud.
  
• It can make particular words or phrases memorable and catchy.
  

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Assonance is the repetition of the same or similar vowel sounds in a series of words in a sentence or a phrase. Like consonance, the repeated sounds could appear at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the words.

Source: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The first thing that comes to one's mind is twisters like this one: Betty Botter bought some butter but, she said, the butter's bitter; if I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter. But a bit of better butter, that will make my batter better.
Also I noted that ancients loved to construct such repetitive phrases in Latin. For example, phrase "Vi veri universum vivus vici", or mentioned by me earlier song "Veni virgo virginum".
The most famous medieval verse herbals are Mocer's De viribus herbarum and Henry of Huntingdon's Aglicanus ortus, but it needs to be examined whether they used such devices as consonance or they didn't. In general, I think it is possibe that the VMs contains some parts of the verse text, no matter, the author's own one or copied.

(13-02-2023, 10:28 PM)Searcher Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The text is full of long sequences of ch, sh, o, r, d, etc. They are not so notable in the text, but it doesn't mean that their strings less significant. 

I should check ch/sh sequences. ch/sh are similar to k/t in probability of getting an existing word by replacing one with the other, especially for common words, which gives them a random-like quality. I don't understand what you mean by o, r, d.

The Latin examples of alliteration that you give are remarkable because they are rare. There is nothing in literature like what we see in the VMS anyway. Too many literary devices kill the literary devices hypothesis. I know some authors don't have limits: there is a French 300-page book written entirely without the letter "e", and there are two VMS pages, 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. , written entirely without EVA-e, coincidentally.

About alliteration, k/t function as consonants too, because they are inserted next to apparent vowels, making the text look less strange. Why would they then make the text so babble-like? It defeats the purpose of making it believable. I don't believe even hoaxers (in Torsten Timm's self-citation theory) would mindlessly copy nearby chunks of text so much that they have several in close vicinity, without realizing how poor the lexical diversity has become, and then consistently made it stay even lower in an entire section: quire 13. I found a Latin book that has a very low type-token ratio. The manuscript is even worse than the printed version. So anything is possible. But is it likely? No.

(16-02-2023, 01:26 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(13-02-2023, 10:28 PM)Searcher Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The text is full of long sequences of ch, sh, o, r, d, etc. They are not so notable in the text, but it doesn't mean that their strings less significant. 

I should check ch/sh sequences. ch/sh are similar to k/t in probability of getting an existing word by replacing one with the other, especially for common words, which gives them a random-like quality. I don't understand what you mean by o, r, d.

o, r: 
f3r, line 15: tsheoarom  shor  or  chor  olchsy chom  otchom  oporar
o, r, a:
f15v, line 2: 3chor  or  oro  r aiin  cthy  tain  dar

d, o, a, r:
f5v, line 3: qotcho  ytor  daiin  daiin  otchor  daiin qo  dar chor  do

d, o:
f6v, line 4: y  shckhy  ytchoy  sos  y dady  dchy dey  okody  ytody
f7v, last line: sho  keeo  daiir  chokchy  dor  deol  dy  doldaiin

l, o, e, d:
f1v, line 7: qo  ol  choees  cheol  dol  cthey  ykol dol  dolo  ykol  do lchedy

(not counting y, ch, sh, t and the others)
It is a frequent phenomenon in the VMs when some lines contain words with a strictly limited group of characters, but, of course, it happens not in every line.
Or you meant something another?

(16-02-2023, 07:25 PM)Searcher Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Or you meant something another?

Yes. I was looking at binary sequences of k and t gallows because they seem unrelated: they are not part of a (known) pattern. But then we would have a random distribution (as random as if shuffled if truly unrelated or as random as humans typically manage when they try to approximate randomness if they were written sequentially by hoaxers), and we don't.

On the other hand, since "or" is a common pattern, the o/r sequence is naturally biased.

This is a rightward-leftward plot a-la Patrick Feaster (see figure 2 in his Malta paper You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). The plot is only qualitatively comparable with Patrick's, since benched gallows cth ckh are excluded from his plot but included in mine.
[attachment=7197]

Qualitative results are quite comparable, showing that 't' has a marked drop after the first position, then slowly rises, dropping again at the last position. 'k' instead rises from the first to the second position; it is almost flat mid-line and it also drops at the end. The two curves are close at line start/end and distant in all other positions. The ratio plot shows a clear pattern. Such pattern can also be seen in separate plots for Currier A and B.
[attachment=7196]
[attachment=7195]

The relation of this with the long sequences pointed out by Nablator is not obvious. It would seem that 't' sequences are more likely to go through a line break, since 'k' is rarer at line boundaries.

(17-02-2023, 09:13 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The plot is only qualitatively comparable with Patrick's, since benched gallows cth ckh are excluded from his plot but included in mine.

For what it's worth, my corresponding plot in that paper likewise includes the benched gallows -- it uses the same selection criteria as the preceding Table 3, which I should probably have clarified.

I suppose one line of speculation might be that the "preferences" of [k] and [t] for different parts of the line increase the probability of continuous blocks of text occurring in which only one or the other of these glyphs appears -- but of course it's frustratingly difficult to tell what's the cause and what's the effect.

(17-02-2023, 03:25 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(17-02-2023, 09:13 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The plot is only qualitatively comparable with Patrick's, since benched gallows cth ckh are excluded from his plot but included in mine.

For what it's worth, my corresponding plot in that paper likewise includes the benched gallows -- it uses the same selection criteria as the preceding Table 3, which I should probably have clarified.

Thank you, Patrick! I thought benched gallows were excluded because Y values are quite lower in your plot than in mine (~30% vs ~45% for k+t in the first bin; 'k' average ~22% vs ~30%); there must be some other reason for this difference, but I cannot guess what it might be.

(17-02-2023, 03:25 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I suppose one line of speculation might be that the "preferences" of [k] and [t] for different parts of the line increase the probability of continuous blocks of text occurring in which only one or the other of these glyphs appears -- but of course it's frustratingly difficult to tell what's the cause and what's the effect.

This seems likely to apply to shorter sequences, while I am not sure that line preferences can have an impact on sequences that span several lines. Both phenomena are suggestive of rules for Voynichese word-order but, as you say, their relationship is difficult to grasp. If these are the bricks of Voynichese grammar, something they have in common is that they don't look like the grammar of natural languages.

(17-02-2023, 04:26 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thank you, Patrick! I thought benched gallows were excluded because Y values are quite lower in your plot than in mine (~30% vs ~45% for k+t in the first bin; 'k' average ~22% vs ~30%); there must be some other reason for this difference, but I cannot guess what it might be.

For my plot, I limited the dataset to words that exist in what I was calling "homologous" pairs, excluding any [k] words that don't have equivalent [t] words attested, and vice versa.  If you didn't do likewise, that might explain why your overall percentages are higher than mine.

I also assigned bins 1 and 10 to the first and last words in lines, dividing up the rest of the line between the eight bins in between, rather than dividing the whole line evenly into ten bins (as I'd done previously for some similar plots).  The choice between these two approaches will naturally have some effect on the shapes of the curves.

(17-02-2023, 04:26 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This seems likely to apply to shorter sequences, while I am not sure that line preferences can have an impact on sequences that span several lines.

Agreed, I don't see how it would apply to those longer sequences either -- I'm just trying to think of any ways in which the two phenomena might connect.

In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I presented some statistical evidence that it's more likely overall for a [t] to be followed by another [t] within the next 4-6 glyphs, and for a [k] to be followed by another [k] within the same distance, than it is for a [t] to be followed by a [k] or vice versa.  That also seems consistent with a tendency towards "blocks," for whatever it's worth.

A few plots based on the Zandbergen-Landini transliteration (ZL_ivtff_2b.txt) and color-coded according to the scribes identified by Lisa Fagin Davis (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). As always, it is possible I made errors along the way.

This tries to replicate the plot You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: the Y axis shows (k-t)/(k+t) while the X axis correspond to the order of pages in the manuscript.

[attachment=7200]

As Nablator pointed out, there is not much correlation: I think I can see a light rising trend left-to-right, but this does not seem to depend on scribes. In particular, HerbalA and Pharma (both by Scribe 1) appear to be well distinct: slight prevalence of 't' in HerbalA and stronger prevalence of 'k' in Pharma.

This plot show the percentage of t (X axis) and k (Y axis) with respect to the total of EVA characters in each page (all spaces were ignored). Again, there does not seem to be any clear separation between scribes. Here an anti-correlated trend is quite clear: when there are many 't's there tend to be fewer 'k's and vice-versa.

[attachment=7198]

This third plot shows the longest 't' sequence (X) and the longest 'k' sequence (Y) for each page. These numbers are not robust with respect to transliteration: e.g. Takahashi misread a couple of occurrences of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., breaking one of the longest k-sequences. Similarly, the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. depends on how the weird ligature at the start of the last paragraph is rendered.

It seems interesting that the outliers with high values were produced by four different scribes. Apparently, Scribe 2 took part in both the longest k-sequences (f83v) and t-sequences (f86v3 and 4).

[attachment=7199]

I would like to compare these figures with actual linguistic texts. We know that these sequences are different from a randomly arranged text, but I am curious to see if they are as incompatible with natural languages as I expect.