The Voynich Ninja

(12-03-2023, 11:51 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It also seems to me quite probable that we shouldn't treat each of Voynich letters independently but rather work
with common groups of letter like or, ol, ain etc.

If we did so, another problem emerges however. If we assume that groups of Voynich letters code single letters in the plaintext
then the supposed words in the plaintext become really short - usually 2 or 3 letters.

If we treat space as space then text made of such words would be generally very improbable, unless we assume that the words are heavily shortened.

The words length need to be hidden, so the spaces in the VMS cant be the real spaces. A way to hide words length is a continuous text without spacing, another way is adding spaces. The second one is worst that the first as it gives more clues of the composition of the n-gramms. 
Why to choose the second one? A possible explanation is to easy the reading for those who know the code, so they can read the VMS directly.

[attachment=7255]

What I want to say about the word frequency. As soon as I am in an enumeration, no more rules apply.
Thus, hand, lot, quentin, spoon, and others are used as quantities.
Exactly these then often occur one after the other.
But this does not allow for statistics, because it only occurs occasionally.

Thanks for all the answers.

Speaking of very radical shortening of text, such examples do exist although are rare.

From Cipher Mysteries blog: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Our Fth wch rt n hvn ; hlwd b y Nm
Y Kgdm cm Y wl b dn n rth z it s n Hvn
(Lord's Prayer)

And another case, a cipher of Girolamo Sirtori:  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

S.R, DEO GD. SN,. AQ^,. NQ^,. IND. NONL,.
EDO VN UCD. LV. IAG, EIC. HO.
LN, NO,. N`. P^N AG. .E. LQ^, P^C, N^%Q^.,
SI, UO. VOI. UO., R”Q^ NQ^O NON, IA”,.
DG, .F. D.ON. SUS”. HP^,. VP^, .EL,. P^IN,.
R”D . D.OV. AS, IU P^OCI,.
R”Q^: N. D, IN^O, R”N, LQ^, IAD.,,
GUO, EDG. A^, .E. F^O. ED, IX^. DN^.
L.D. DN,. IU, VGO. HO,,. IQ^, V,V
IA”. N^L. R”P”, ND. R”P”, GE. U^ SION
IO ,I, I, E^. AN^ LR^. NN^D. DR^P”,.
EY. SG.B,,, D, EIX^ N^N LP^,,
P^NU” DR^ IN^A” IO, DO
R^N^ Q^I S^
G N” I,
SIR^ GI

(I don't know if the solution described in the comment and presented above was finally accepted as true or not).

I totally agree that abbreviations won't explain everything about Voynich words. They won't explain "y" being at the end of 50% of words or so.
But maybe "y" isn't a real letter, just some "joker" or "wildcard".

As I learnt, we can speak of two kinds of abbreviations - suspension and contraction:  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Contraction is removing middle of the word so "doctor" becomes "dr".
Suspension is keeping the beginning and removing the end - "reverend" becomes "rev."

Maybe "y" is a a sign of suspension, working like a dot after "rev"???

(13-03-2023, 03:07 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[attachment=7256]

What I want to say about the word frequency. As soon as I am in an enumeration, no more rules apply.
Thus, hand, lot, quentin, spoon, and others are used as quantities.
Exactly these then often occur one after the other.
But this does not allow for statistics, because it only occurs occasionally.

There seems to be a lot of structure in this passage, though indeed one could say that a recipe is more enumeration than grammatical language. It can be helpful in illustrating how much Voynich repetitiveness also exceed non-linguistic examples like this. One could say that the German recipe has even more structure than natural language, while Voynichese appears to have very little grammar (with puzzling exceptions like line-effects and consecutive repetitions).

The recipe appears to be made of a series of items (ingredients) each showing three parts:

1.ArabicNumber 2.lot(t) 3.SpecificIngredient

The text shows the short/long alternation discussed by Gaskell and Bowern, with longer words only occurring in part 3.

Here is a very rough transcription of the first three lines. Spacing is uncertain in a few cases and I will have made a few errors, but these details do not affect the overall reasoning:

3 lott borretsch blümen 3 lott anis 1lott kimich
1lott peterlisamen 1lott 1lot fenchelsamen 2lot
kressen 1 lott salvaii diss stoss ze samen und mach

One can compare this with three Voynich lines which also contain multiple occurrences of the same word (qokeey). E.g. 103r.27-29

[attachment=7257]

qokechy.okeey.qokeey.lkeeody.sheey.qokeey,lkeol.tchey,qokeey.okeey.qokaly
deshedy.qokeeey.dalkain.okaiin.chedy.qokeey.otain.ain.ol.cheey.lkeedy
qokeeechy.shokeey.qochey.qokeey.chal.chedy

Here there is no clear short/long alternation. Differently from the German text, sequences of similar words are immediately apparent. For instance, there are 11 occurrences of the oke-y pattern, with 7 of the occurrences making part of three clusters of consecutive occurrences. There are four ai(i)n words, all in line 2, in two clusters of two occurrences each.

qokechy.okeey.qokeey.lkeeody.sheey.qokeey,lkeol.tchey,qokeey.okeey.qokaly
deshedy.qokeeey.dalkain.okaiin.chedy.qokeey.otain.ain.ol.cheey.lkeedy
qokeeechy.shokeey.qochey.qokeey.chal.chedy

The only quasi-consecutive bits in the German text are 1lott 1lot in line 2. So we have 1 instance of consecutive similar words in the German passage vs 5 instances in the Voynich passage. BTW, I may be wrong, but the German repetition looks like a typo to me; if so, it is probably quite exceptional in the whole manuscript, while consecutive couples of similar words occur in most VMS lines.

(13-03-2023, 09:43 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I totally agree that abbreviations won't explain everything about Voynich words.

If you go a step further, try and find an equivalence between letters in heavily abbreviated words and common short patterns in Voynichese, you will notice that there are strong ordering constraints that will force anagramming (reordering), or else you will get only short vords (Voynichese words). It's always qokeedy, never dykeeqo.

Perceived "shortening-like" effect may be produced through some kind of spatial spread algorithm, approaches to which I once explored You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Simple "radical shortening" would hardly produce positional glyph-level effects observed in the Voynichese, such as positional rigidity and the curve-line boundary.