The Voynich Ninja

(15-12-2025, 08:29 AM)kckluge Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(13-12-2025, 02:22 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That's exactly what Colin and I have done with Latent Semantic Analysis. More here, and article coming soon:

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The evidence from Colin's analytics shows exactly what you're asking - a very strong textual correlation across conjoint bifolia in both the balneology and stars sections. We did NOT find that correlation across conjoint bifolia in the herbal section, which suggests that, as long suspected, each herbal page is it's own semantic unit.



In other words, 104v and 115r (conjoint) are more closely related than, say, 104v and 105r (consecutive).

It seems to me that this (the difference in LSA behavior between the balneology & stars section bifolia on the one hand and the herbal bifolia on the other) speaks strongly against theories involving glossolalia/automatic writing, Ruggian grids, self-citation methods, etc. because there is no obvious reason for such text generation mechanisms to produce bifolia with different LSA behavior in different (types of) sections. Or am I misunderstanding what the LSA analysis is saying about the herbal bifolia vs the balneology & stars bifolia?

Based on what I'm reading here, self-citation can, in theory, explain the LSA behavior, but you have to add an extra assumption: That self-citation in non-herbal sections was done 
at the bifolium level, but in the herbal section it was done on the page level. I would argue that indeed this extra assumption does work against the self-citation theory.

It occurred to me that the Author may actually have intended to make a bound book, but did not realize that, for that purpose, the pages had to be written on the bifolios in a complicated order, because the bifolios would have to be gathered and nested into quires.

That mistake may seem too stupid once one thinks about it, but it is the kind of thing that could be overlooked by someone who had no previous experience in creating a book. And that seems likely to be the the case for both the VMS Author and his Scribe.

(I seem to recall making that mistake myself when trying to laser-print on A4 paper, two-sided, what was meant to be a booklet in A5 size.  And I seem to recall that some word processor or PDF viewer had an option to do the necessary shuffling of the pages.) 

All the best, --stolfi

There were other options apart from the book.

Personally I consider the option that Voynich Manuscript could be originally a folded almanac.

In such case it would be a collection of loose folios carried in some box.
The hint is the presence of numerous foldouts in VM which are generally rare in manuscripts.


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