Thoughts on punctuation or junk in the Voynich manuscript.
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The most common punctuation marks in Dante's La Divina Commedia (Project Gutenberg edition); and for comparison, some Voynich glyphs with similar frequencies. Author's analysis.
Hello Bob,
in the Middle Ages, punctuation seems to have differed significantly from modern punctuation. Do you know of any (late) medieval texts in which the punctuation corresponds to your list ? Is the punctuation in La Divina Commedia "original" ?
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edit:
Quote:One of Aldus’s and Bembo’s major innovations was the liberal use of punctuation, a feature often missing from manuscripts and earlier printed texts.
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First page of the Purgatorio section
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Login to view. (15th Century). Zero punctuation.
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Login to view. is earlier (~1380) and also has no punctuation (f.26v for the same passage).
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The verse format is special; it has implied punctuation at the end of each line. For prose, punctuation and capitalization were often so inconsistent and weird in manuscripts that they had to be redone from scratch in printed editions, and changed again in later editions as conventions evolved.
A fragment of prose from the 15th Century Bonaventura manuscript You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.. Including hyphens, I count 4 occurrences in the manuscript passage vs 11 in the print version. This is representative of what I found in the 10 pages I transcribed (the manuscript has less than half the punctuation in the print version).
So I can assume that punctuation was rarely used in manuscripts (not in printed works) ? The different meaning of punctuation in (late) medieval works compared to modern works also seems to be proven ( see links ). This varied not only over time, but also from manuscript to manuscript. There was no uniform punctuation.
A comparison with the VMS (based on frequency) is therefore hardly possible. One would have to take into account the circumstances described, which would probably be very difficult to realize.
We had some discussion of that once: You are not allowed to view links.
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In short, punctuation was definitely known by that time but not used extensively.
This given, punctuation as such just serves delimitation purposes in the first place. In this view I find it interesting that
m exhibits frequency behaviour roughly corresponding to period.
Lisa Fagin Davis said you would expect to see punctuation and capital letters in a text from this period in a western language, and that it's very unusual to see none.
(31-03-2024, 03:38 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Lisa Fagin Davis said you would expect to see punctuation and capital letters in a text from this period in a western language, and that it's very unusual to see none.
But ciphered texts of the period have none. Even spaces are omitted.
(31-03-2024, 04:11 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But ciphered texts of the period have none. Even spaces are omitted.
You mean the ciphertext itself or the underlying plain text?