The Voynich Ninja

(07-05-2026, 10:14 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That's a really interesting theory - but does it actually fit the distribution of m?

In what sense?

That proposed explanation (m is an abbreviation, used mostly when needed to delay a line break) predicts that m is much more common at line end than in the middle of a line.  To that extent, it seems to agree with that table.  Is there something else that does not fit?

All the best, --stolfi

@ Stolfi That was a question asked out of genuine curiosity.

At first glance, the “m” just doesn't seem that clear to me. The inner “m” is, on average, 20.4 glyphs away from the end of the line. Baseline (all token-final glyphs, not at the end of the line): 24.1 glyphs. So the inner “m” is only slightly closer to the end of the line than other endings

Plus: with this definition, you’re taking another glyph away from the VMS, which is tricky in itself.

But since we all just have theories who knows if the m doesn’t actually serve this function...especially since it could have two functions.

(08-05-2026, 06:04 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.At first glance, the “m” just doesn't seem that clear to me. The inner “m” is, on average, 20.4 glyphs away from the end of the line. Baseline (all token-final glyphs, not at the end of the line): 24.1 glyphs. So the inner “m” is only slightly closer to the end of the line than other endings

The proposal is that the Scribe could use certain abbreviations like iin -> m anywhere, but would most often use them at the very end of the line, to delay a line break.   Especially to avoid ending the parag with a one-word line. 

Thus the inner ms should have a more or less random distribution along the line, as if m was just another letter. 

Quote:Plus: with this definition, you’re taking another glyph away from the VMS, which is tricky in itself.

On the other hand, I believe that ee is a single letter in the same class as Ch and Sh.  And also that the gallows k, t, CTh, CKh, and the "benches" Ch, Sh, ee can take a postfix e modifier.  That is, Ch and Che are two distinct letters.  These spelling rules would add 7 letters to the "alphabet".  

And maybe the "circles" a, o, y function as modifiers of other letters, too.

All the best, --stolfi

(08-05-2026, 09:40 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the other hand, I believe that ee is a single letter in the same class as Ch and Sh.  And also that the gallows k, t, CTh, CKh, and the "benches" Ch, Sh, ee can take a postfix e modifier.  That is, Ch and Che are two distinct letters.  These spelling rules would add 7 letters to the "alphabet".  

And maybe the "circles" a, o, y function as modifiers of other letters, too.

This is quite along the lines of a draft word model that was used in my 'Voynich music' paper:
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The complete model is still not published, even though I thought that could happen in 2024....

I really need to split this thread. Can one of the participants in the parallel discussion advise me on a title?

There are probably two:

1. What can the structural peculiarities of the VMS tell us about the nature of the underlying text...
2. What special characteristics do certain letters have, but maybe this belong to 1

Quote:@ Stolfi
On the other hand, I believe that ee is a single letter in the same class as Ch and Sh.  And also that the gallows k, t, CTh, CKh, and the "benches" Ch, Sh, ee can take a postfix e modifier.  That is, Ch and Che are two distinct letters.  These spelling rules would add 7 letters to the "alphabet".
And maybe the "circles" a, o, y function as modifiers of other letters, too.

Yes i agree ee could be a single letter, there are quite other bigrams that could be one Letter/ one stucture. If you define bigrams other than letters, you end up with 30–40 possible letters, depending on. The problem with the bank gallows and the postfix, yes i think that's possible too -  a, o maybe.., y is an extremely unusual glyph, with a tight connection to the space character and qo, and a few other peculiarities...

We all know the peculiarities of y. In my opinion, it is with relative certainty not an ordinary letter, but a position-dependent functional glyph. And the proportion of space transitions involving y is a strong indication that the spaces in VMS are not neutral word boundaries, but possibly active cipher elements. On the other hand, yqo (without a space) could also be a trigram (rule: ALWAYS separate yqo with a space after y so that an uninitiated reader might think it's Latin...which actually worked  ), a trigram that perhaps stands for a letter or a syllable.

But these are all factors that don't exactly make solving the VMS any easier...

(06-05-2026, 06:48 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(06-05-2026, 06:19 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.4. It is a nomenclature system with lists switched by f.e. line-start markers, and the lists no longer exist.

That "code switching by line" is the LAAFU hypothesis.  I don't think there is real evidence for it.

No, that's not the LAAFU hypothesis.

The LAAFU hypothesis is merely that lines are a "functional unit" -- which is to say that each line is composed in such a way that different positions within it display different characteristics, and that these differences can shed light on how the underlying system works and are worth documenting and exploring for that reason.

What the existence of such patterns might reveal is another question beyond that -- and, indeed, the question of this newly broken-off thread.  But the investigation itself should, I believe, be analogous to something like frequency analysis: we first find out what all the patterns are, and then we try to account for them.

Your own argument about them appears to run something like this:

1. There's evidence that the text was written to fill available space on the specific pages we have (I agree).

2. Someone would have been crazy to write directly on parchment -- there'd be too much risk of mistakes that would need to be corrected -- so there must have been an earlier draft.

3. The text we have is so riddled with mistakes that whoever wrote it must not have understood what they were writing -- so this must have been a copyist Scribe separate from the Author.

4. That last scenario is incompatible with meaningful line patterning because line breaks originate in the copy and wouldn't have been present in the earlier draft; therefore there must not be any meaningful line patterning, and any line patterning must be superficial and ultimately insignificant.

5. If we can show through simulations that some rule-based protocol for introducing line breaks into any text could ever produce statistical anomalies of any kind at the starts and ends of lines, then we can conclude that this is the correct explanation for any and all such anomalies in the VMS, without needing to account for specific positional differences any more concretely.

That seems to be your position on what line-based structural peculiarities "tell us about the nature of the underlying text" -- which is to say, the rest of your analysis requires them to tell us nothing at all, but instead to conform to preexisting expectations.

A more rigorous exercise in support of the line-break hypothesis might involve taking some actual section of the VMS and presenting for it (1) a hypothetical, statistically flat "author's draft" version of the text without line breaks, or with different line breaks; and (2) a simple set of rules for converting that text into a "scribe's copy" that displays line-based patterns identical to (or very close to) the ones we actually see.

(08-05-2026, 12:54 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A more rigorous exercise in support of the line-break hypothesis might involve taking some actual section of the VMS and presenting for it (1) a hypothetical, statistically flat "author's draft" version of the text without line breaks, or with different line breaks; and (2) a simple set of rules for converting that text into a "scribe's copy" that displays line-based patterns identical to (or very close to) the ones we actually see.

And then a follow-up experiment: take the inferred "author's draft" and run it through the same set of copying / line-break rules, but now with the length available for each line increased to something like 1.3 times its current capacity.  The line breaks will now mostly fall in different places.  Does the "copied" result still display the same line-positional patterns as before?

(07-05-2026, 10:14 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the distribution of m

If you are curious to know my own opinion on  m and why it often comes at the end of a line then you might like to read a previous post of mine [ You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ]. I still stand by what I wrote on that occasion.