The Voynich Ninja

Link to the printed version mentioned by Patrick 

Quote: Christs Victorie over the Dragon beginning at page 828

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Page 828 is unnambered, but you can search PAGE 829 or The cruelty of the dragon is in them

(16-03-2025, 05:32 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.For what it's worth, I believe words do tend to follow a more rigid structure here than they do in English longhand.

Thanks for the great example, Patrick. This bit still feels counterintuitive to me though. It would be interesting to compare some statistics, if it were at all possible.

This is a rough transcription of 3 lines based on the hints and printed text mentioned by Patrick.

[attachment=10179]

1. o. wr^ of o. dn~ is in.y~, as he t chi.y mo 9.&in-
sp.^s y~, & is th.^ Gn~l, S.lg co~miss.~ to his vni u^s.l vicar
& Leuten.t, rec.g pow^ fr him, Apoc.13.2.


1 the wrath of the dragon is in them, as he the chiefe moover, ins-
pires them, and is their General, Sealing commission to his universal vicar 
and Leutenant, receiving power from him, Apoc. 13. 2.


Based on the printed text:
1 The wrath of the dragon is in them, as the chiefe moover, inspirer, and General, who seales commission to his universal Vicar and Liutenant, who receives power from him, Revel. 13. 2.


My impression is that this heavily abbreviated text probably behaves like the texts analyzed by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and is likely to have a higher entropy than a non-abbreviated text. But of course, in order to produce an actual measure, one would need a much longer transcription (and plain-text, for comparison).

EDIT: for instance, frequent trigrams like "the" and "ing" are replace by bigrams or single characters like "o." and "g".

(17-03-2025, 09:41 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.1. o. wr^ of o. dn~ is in.y~, as he t chi.y mo 9.&in-
sp.^s y~, & is th.^ Gn~l, S.lg co~miss.~ to his vni u^s.l vicar
& Leuten.t, rec.g pow^ fr him, Apoc.13.2.

Here's what I came up with for that passage:

[attachment=10180]

1. The wrath of the dragon is in them, as he that chiefly mous & in-
spires them, and is their General, sealing commission to his vniuersal vicar
and Lieutenant, receiuing power from him, Apoc. 13. 2.

What looks like a dot in "in.y~" is, I believe, actually part of the "i" one line below.  Final "9" is often used for "-us" even in English words such as "thus"; in this case, it seems to be used similarly in "mous" for "mov's" (i.e., "moves").  On further thought, I've concluded that the symbol for "that" isn't "+" but simply "t." with the final period sometimes joined to the "t" -- similar to the dot at the end of "fr.", which ends up looking more like "fn" as a result.

I too am skeptical about this kind of abbreviation lowering entropy on the whole.  However, some contrastive phonemic or graphemic information that would ordinarily be reflected in writing gets removed when it isn't required for comprehension, leading to similar forms for quite dissimilar words (e.g., "bo." = "body"; "so." = "soul").  Word endings also seem to gravitate towards a more limited range of forms, so that -- for example -- a final superscript "t" or "r" can substitute for a variety of longhand phonemic or graphemic sequences.  Even though fewer characters end up being used, the characters that are kept seem in some respects to be unexpectedly predictable.  But again: I don't know whether these tendencies are strong enough to counterbalance the increase of entropy we'd typically associate with abbreviation in general.

Thank you, Patrick! mous for moves is very cool 

Since you have such accurate transcription and plain text reading, it should be possible to take actual measures and see the statistical differences between the two.