The matter of different scribes also comes into play here. The individual who produced this character string may not have been the same one that wrote the Herbal text. There is some deviation from the norm in other circular diagrams as well.
The ones I find most interesting (other than the completely broken cases like Rene mentioned) are like this "olaiior oloro eeeoly", the bottom line of F23v.
"ior" shouldn't happen, and it being a part of 3 unique words at the bottom of a page of text and also the only 3 words on the line.. makes be a bit suspicious about how "voynich" they are collectively. Outside of my simple rules, they just don't look very voynich to me, so I'm guessing they also break more complex rules put forth by others (I should probably use "preferences" rather than "rules".. but you get the idea). They feel a bit like someone trying to use the system to write something you can't mess around with as much. A name or date for example and it broke the normal flow, or maybe a more simple style of ciphering employed.
"oloro" also has this weird spacing "o.l.o.r.o" which reminds me of "lkody" on You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. and doesn't seem to be a very common thing, so I'm not sure its just by chance.
Has someone mapped out the distribution of abnormal words throughout the manuscript?
Are the abnormal words spread relatively evenly throughout the manuscript or are they concentrated on certain pages? Such as amongst labels.
(20-06-2025, 02:29 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the distribution of abnormal words
By 'abnormal' do you mean words that only occur once? I have recently been using hypothesis testing methods of statistics to investigate how much confidence there is in the hypothesis that certain classes of words are distributed regularly. In particular I have looked at the distribution of words within the StarsB3 pages that only occur once within those pages.
I might have more to say about this work in a later post.
Apparently 43% of the words there only occur once. But they are not regularly distributed. You are not allowed to view links.
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No, "abnormal" words, as discussed in this thread, are words that feel "weird", not fitting the general scheme of how words in VM are contructed. Read the thread from the beginning to see examples
And I'm afraid we don't have a full list of such words. Such a list would be of course subjective but it is possible to make it.
As we don't have the list, we cannot discuss the distribution.
(21-06-2025, 10:22 AM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.are words that feel "weird", not fitting the general scheme
Strictly singles tend to be words that don't 'fit the general scheme' ( whatever precisely it is that 'general scheme' is supposed to mean ).
My intention was rather to highlight the fact ( which to the best of my knowledge no-one else has discovered ) that single words ( which must surely include weird ones, or those that don't fit ) appear not to be uniformly distributed. This fact might possibly shed some light on the structure of the text of the manuscript.
(21-06-2025, 10:22 AM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.No, "abnormal" words, as discussed in this thread, are words that feel "weird", not fitting the general scheme of how words in VM are contructed. Read the thread from the beginning to see examples
And I'm afraid we don't have a full list of such words. Such a list would be of course subjective but it is possible to make it.
As we don't have the list, we cannot discuss the distribution.
The big problem is to define and demonstrate which 'the general scheme of how the words in VM are constructed' actually is.
I can give you this list, defined as "word types which cannot be found by the slot grammar (see below the definition) in transcription RF1a-n (word types with 'rare' characters excluded)", but I could actually give you thousands and thousands of different lists derived from different grammars (none of which is, very much probably, 'the actual general scheme underlying VM words'), and even more lists created with other criteria (ie.: using the bigrams frequency, etc. etc.):
cpholteedycfhoepaiin
saraloaly
dalkalytam
teodyteytar
chkaidararal
shoefcheeykechy
lkaltaraty
toroaldar
olkeealkchedy
psheykedaleey
opalkechckhy
salchtedytar
poldarairol
lolkedykain
dolarshydor
oteoodalsy
The grammar is:
Slot 1: ch sh y
Slot 2: eee ee e q a
Slot 3: o
Slot 4: iii ii i d
Slot 5: l k r s t p f cth ckh cph cfh n m y
and it loops on itself for a maximum of 5 times.
(21-06-2025, 10:54 AM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.cpholteedycfhoepaiin
saraloaly ...
These words are all long. Might it be easier just to find the distribution of all words over 7 characters ( or 8, 9, 10 ... ). All words of these lengths look weird to me.
MYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
Single words (appearing only once, so called "hapax legomena") are another interesting thing worth researching. They actually may be "weird" or not. Of course nothing prohibits us researching both single words and weird words
Mauro: Yes, precise defining of "weird" words may be difficult.
But personally I am not very fond of looking for perfect definitions because it may put you into total block. Let me quote great physicist Richard Feynmann:
We can’t define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers one saying to the other: “you don’t know what you are talking about!”. The second one says: “what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?
I may try to make a list of "weird" words one day, if time and motivation allows. And I would do it just by intuition.
It would be a start, anybody could watch if, discuss it and eventually make a better one