The Voynich Ninja

(14-11-2025, 08:43 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.general rightward/downward issue of Patrick

Where can I read more about this?

All the best, --stolfi

(14-11-2025, 08:59 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(14-11-2025, 08:43 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.general rightward/downward issue of Patrick

Where can I read more about this?

All the best, --stolfi

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There is also his 2022 conference paper, as PDF and as video.
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I've long been wondering if all those 'evolutions' like Line Initials, Rightwardness, Downwardness, Endwardness and Line- Paragraph and Page as a Function can be explained by some sort of process being described. More rigid than a recipe but less rigid than mathematical calculations. Maybe a textual logical operation. You define starting conditions, variables and operators that modify them until a result is achieved. Such (Pseudo-) logical operations could be anything from philosophy, a religious exercise to magical or alchemical thinking and wouldn't necessarily make much sense for an outsider. This could also include the self-citation hypothesis as the author would repeatedly pick up certain terms and 'play around' with them in different ways or put them in a different context.

Hard to prove or disprove and therefore not a very good hypothesis but I think we must acknowledge that some sort of algorithm is at work here that continuously shapes the text in a much more rigid way than ordinary prose or even poetry. Yet I would think all too stringent mathematics like astronomical calculations or book-keeping with roman numerals would lose the text's language-like properties. Has this been tested?

(14-11-2025, 10:47 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hard to prove or disprove and therefore not a very good hypothesis but I think we must acknowledge that some sort of algorithm is at work here that continuously shapes the text in a much more rigid way than ordinary prose or even poetry.

As far as I have familiarized myself with the subject so far, creating a text in meter is definitely a very strictly functional methodology. One must first understand the rules. A line of text can also deviate significantly from the standard pattern. See here:

Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae.

—  —  | —  u  u  |  —  // —  |  —    —  |  —  u  u | —  x

Al bā | nī que pa | trēs // at | que al tae | moe ni a | Rō mae


A purely dactylic line of hexameter would look like this (—  = long, u = short , x = variable)

— uu | — uu | — uu | — uu | — uu | — x

Patrick went into some ideas that you may find interesting here Bernd 
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Skip down to
§ 7
Numerical Manipulations

I enjoyed reading the whole thing, but it is a very long post.. maybe one to bookmark if you find it interesting and start from the top 

It might be a stupid question, but does the text in circles (I.e. astronomical and rose sections) behave like the rest of the text or more like labelese, LAAFU and other properties included? I have a strong feeling (not really substantiated by any fact) that IF voynichese is the result of some sort of 15th century cipher, then labelese is enciphered differently from the main text. I was curious to see whether the strings of text in the circles followed labelese or voynichese rules. 

I also wonder, if it is a cipher, and this cipher follows some sort of vertical AND horizontal patterning that varies at the page level, how did the reader decipher it? Is there usually some sort of tell indicating "use encryption table A" for example? Could something of the sort be happening in the VM?

I don't think that's a stupid question. A really interesting one that I hadn't really considered much before tbh.
It's not a very complete/good answer, but I addressed this image on another post today where we can see the "start line"  preceeding it is m which we expect to see more line end than start. Might be worth a check of circular text in general, but it gives me the feeling at least some circular text follows line "rules".. ("preferences" is probably a better term..) 

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(14-11-2025, 09:03 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Wow, Patrick's paper is quite a big meal to digest.

Some things I wish he had done differently or deeper: 

1. Remove the head lines of parags.  Among other things, that line is likely to have special contents (like plant names and aliases), which could well imply different word frequencies and positional patterns, and hence the same for characters and digraphs.

One problem to watch for here is that parag breaks are sometimes not obvious.  In the Stars section, in particular, I suspect that there there is a run of 5-6 parags that were joined by the Scribe (a newbie?) into a single parag, before he returned to the normal format.

2. Limit the analysis to just one of the sections with substantial running text -- Herbal-A, Herbal-B, Bio, and Stars.  If the anomalies are real, they should be noticeable, and probably even stronger, in one of those sections.   If they turn out to be absent or different in other sections, that by itself would be important information.

3. Try to identify the words that are responsible for the anomalies.  Maybe I have misread the tables in the paper, but among the Sh/Ch word pairs, some seem to have greater positional bias than others. 

Could it be, for example, that the most leftward member of the pair often occurs after a long word, while the other member more often occurs after a short one? That could perhaps explain the positional anomaly as a consequence of the line-breaking word-length bias.

Or maybe the two members of the pair can get fused or split at different rates in the transcription.  So that that some of the Sheols are actually Sheoldy while most Cheols are indeed Cheols.  I can't think how this possible confounding factor could be addressed.  Although this may be one case 

All the best, --stolfi

(14-11-2025, 10:59 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As far as I have familiarized myself with the subject so far, creating a text in meter is definitely a very strictly functional methodology. One must first understand the rules. A line of text can also deviate significantly from the standard pattern.

If the VM is poetry, I'd imagine it to be something akin to Ernst Jandl's works
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On a more serious note - I wonder how a meter could explain downwardness beyond a few lines.