The Voynich Ninja

Any theory of Voynichese must also explain labels. If Voynichese words don't correspond to real words then what does that mean in the context of individual isolated labels?

Labels could be abbreviated words, syllables or small n-grams.Like 'PLEI' instead of 'Pleiades'. They could be numbers or index entries to a nomenclator or sth of the sort.

(01-10-2025, 01:01 AM)RadioFM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Labels could be abbreviated words, syllables or small n-grams.Like 'PLEI' instead of 'Pleiades'. They could be numbers or index entries to a nomenclator or sth of the sort.

But what about when labels have the same word attached to distinct and quite different images and also appear as very common words elsewhere in the sentence/paragraph continous text?

(01-10-2025, 05:33 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But what about when labels have the same word attached to distinct and quite different images

There aren't many such cases, are there? 

People often use the same name for different things.  Cancer in Latin could be a crab, a tumor, or a Zodiac constellation. The 28 Mansions (Lunar constellations) of the Chinese include  亢 kàng = "neck", 心 xīn = "heart", 胃 wèi = "stomach", and more...

The repeated labels could also be

• generic words like "tube", "reservoir", "dim", "bone", ...
  
• qualifiers like "big" and "little", "left" and "right", "upper" and "lower", ...
  
• misspellings of similar names, like  "Hydrus"/"Hydra", "adductor"/"abductor" 
  
• ordinal numbers, like "二" for 河鼓二 = "constellation River Drum star 2" = Altair
  

(01-10-2025, 03:18 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(01-10-2025, 05:33 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But what about when labels have the same word attached to distinct and quite different images

There aren't many such cases, are there? 

People often use the same name for different things.  Cancer in Latin could be a crab, a tumor, or a Zodiac constellation. The 28 Mansions (Lunar constellations) of the Chinese include  亢 kàng = "neck", 心 xīn = "heart", 胃 wèi = "stomach", and more...

The repeated labels could also be

• generic words like "tube", "reservoir", "dim", "bone", ...
  
• qualifiers like "big" and "little", "left" and "right", "upper" and "lower", ...
  
• misspellings of similar names, like  "Hydrus"/"Hydra", "adductor"/"abductor" 
  
• ordinal numbers, like "二" for 河鼓二 = "constellation River Drum star 2" = Altair
  

A problem also comes with the fact that many labels have spellings very similar to other distinct labels and can be found as repeated words in sentence text.

The idea that labels represent numerical references like "figure 45" sounds possible at first, but on inspection doesn't seem to fit.

It is on this basis that I concluded that some labels are null or meaningless. Given that these labels appear in the sentence text it follows that some words are null or meaningless. These words tend to be part of very repetitive spelling clusters. There are however words with quite distinctive spellings which I think are unlikely to be null or meaningless. So, I think words can be classified into two groups "filler words" and "real words". I am inclined to think that the majority of words are filler words.

(01-10-2025, 03:34 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The idea that labels represent numerical references like "figure 45" sounds possible at first, but on inspection doesn't seem to fit.

I agree.   It seems very unlikely that the author would have chosen to number all all items in the whole book sequentially.  If the labels are numbers, I expect that they would have been assigned sequentially per page, or at most per section.  Then we would have a lot more repeated, across pages or sections.

(01-10-2025, 05:33 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(01-10-2025, 01:01 AM)RadioFM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Labels could be abbreviated words, syllables or small n-grams.Like 'PLEI' instead of 'Pleiades'. They could be numbers or index entries to a nomenclator or sth of the sort.

But what about when labels have the same word attached to distinct and quite different images and also appear as very common words elsewhere in the sentence/paragraph continous text?

If Voynichese vords and labels both encode chunks instead of whole words, it's not entirely unlikely that some labelese will match with a particular chunk somewhere in the text. The 'plei' for 'Pleiades' example I gave could pop up someplace else encoding 'mett ere multi plei nsie mee mes col are', for instnace.

I think that it's also likely under these hypotheses that a couple of labels will repeat or at least look similar. For example, taking a selected few of Agrippa's mansions of the moon (D'Imperio '78 ) and dropping some letters,
Alchalh → chal
Achala → chala
Alchil → chil
Alcharph → charph

Ofc there could be filler/null words in the main text, null characters and possibly many ways in choosing how to chunk or encode a certain piece of text, that would add more chaos to the mix. It'd be interesting to try to estimate how that could impact the stats.