The Voynich Ninja

The examples that Helmut gives are in the Latin language, not only with the Latin alphabet. Even if his proposal for a system of consecutive abbreviations refers to another European language, it doesn't make much sense to what we know of the Voynich history.
  
I believe that the origin of the book is Central European and I cannot believe that in the court of Emperor Rudolf II no one could decipher the script if it was written in a European language.

After You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it can be assumed that in regular medieval texts the portion of abbreviations lies with an order of magnitude of approx. 7.5%.

See:
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If the writers of the VMS wrote so extremely in abbreviations that the text is no longer readable for others, then a simple question arises: Should the text be hidden from others or not ? In other words: Is it a form of encryption or only a writing habit ( for instance out of convenience ) ? In the latter case there might be a chance for a successful "decryption", otherwise the chances would be rather low.

Perhaps one could work with the frequency of abbreviations:
[attachment=7389]

I explored the idea of abbreviations again.
I think I have an example here of a book like Helmut imagines.
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This is a way of writing by highly studied people.
This would mean that if there were several writers in the VM, all must have been studied people. They would have to understand it and be able to write it themselves.

Conclusion: Even if I look at it this way, the necessary abbreviations for the abbreviated form are missing, and these are not visible in the VM. But these are absolutely necessary.

To regard a VM character as an encrypted abbreviation symbol in order to be able to insert it into an abbreviation would already be too much of a good thing for me.

I think it will remain a theory as long as no examples are given.

(03-06-2023, 03:47 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think I have an example here of a book like Helmut imagines.
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A "normalized" transcription of the first text in Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, A X 44 (Quaestiones quaedam Magistri Stephani) is available here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I relied on that to approximate a "diplomatic" transcription of f.1r with the simple system described You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Of course, my transcription will contain errors and inconsistencies, but I believe it still allows some rough measurements.

Excluding spaces and punctuation, the length of the abbreviated text is 63% that of the normalized text (1908 vs 3035 characters).

At least 80% of the words in the abbreviated text contain an abbreviated symbol; a few others are abbreviated by just dropping some characters, so probably only 10% of the words are not abbreviated in any way. About 25% of characters in the abbreviated text are abbreviation symbols (473 of 1908): the Basel ms is heavily abbreviated, if we compare this figure with the 7.5% You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..


As an example, these words are interpreted as "non tamen oritur ex distinctione" (no[n] t[amen]n orit[u]r ex d[istinctio]ne), with only "ex" written in full. [I guess that the second word could also be read as "tum"]

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Both the normalized and abbreviated text show no occurrences of reduplication or partial reduplication. Voynich f81r/f81v (which together contain about the same number of words as f.1r in the Basel manuscript) show 6 occurrences of perfect reduplication and 8 of partial reduplication (3% of consecutive word couples, in line with the average over the whole manuscript).

Measuring character conditional entropy on 1000-character chunks gives similar values for the normalized and abbreviated text (2.6). The value for Voynich f81r/v is much lower (1.5).

In conclusion, I don't see this example of abbreviated Latin as particularly close to Voynichese, with the known, limited, exception of some similar symbols at least in one case behaving similarly ('9' occurring at the start and end of words).

Below is an early fourteenth-century example of an administrative record with some very extensive use of abbreviations.
Abbreviations have restricted position in writing, bearing some similarity to VMS, but cannot explain other phenomena in my opinion.

The above examples are very hardcore. if I haven't seen them, I wouldn't believe that people shortened their texts so much.

Okay, I actually once had a mate at school who was lazy (or maybe writing not fast enough) and shortened words this way
while making notes. Later he couldn't read himself  


I personally have the same intuition that Voynich plaintext must be heavily shortened.

But there must be something more. Abbreviations don't explain everything. There must be some cipher used which is more advanced than just substution cipher.

Anyway I'm curious to see some parts of text being deciphered by Helmut.

It is not hard to find manuscripts with heavily abbreviated text. What matters is that in all cases the text can be read by people with a sufficient level of experience. These readings are also convincing to people with less experience, like myself.

That such manuscripts exist does not imply in any way  that the Voynich MS is also a case of heavy abbreviation.
We need to be convinced by any piece of meaningful text.

(07-06-2023, 10:36 AM)Scarecrow Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Below is an early fourteenth-century example of an administrative record with some very extensive use of abbreviations.

Heavily abbreviated Latin written in England I guess: see the pointy 'r' written like a descending 'V'?
In the 15th c. the general tendency was to abbreviate less, nor more, than in the earlier centuries.
The best resemblance to the VMs' pseudo-abbreviations can be found in 15th c. Latin manuscripts written with connected macrons (similar to Voynichese u, r, s, n) : a common style at the time.

The structure of this fragment really stands out. Quite unvoynich….

et redd(e?) per annum (Roman numeral) s ... Et facere (with the hook!) in omnibus aliis ...