(17-06-2026, 08:08 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As far as I see these answers, @Jorge_Stolfi constructed his alphabet with counts & calculations, using the relation of two appearance' numbers, compared to a relation of numbers for a second character, to find this second character somehow "being just another edition of the first character", right?
Sorry, I didn't quite understand. But, indeed, it first occurred to me that the ending
ir could be similar to
iin when I was developing my Voynichese word model and saw that the frequencies of
ir,
iir,
iiir were roughly proportional to those of
iin,
iiin,
iiiin. Then I noticed the similarity between the shapes of
r and a moderately sloppy
in.
Since then I have got a few more bit of evidence that (1) the ending
ir is indeed equivalent to
iin, and (2) that equivalence is the result of scribal error rather than an intentional feature of the script. Enough evidence that I now generally assume that equivalence in my analyses.
But, indeed, I have no
proof of either statement. On the other hand, I know of no evidence or argument that contradicts them...
Quote:professional scribes should know where to put a tail onto a dash (taken the very small number of mishaps and corrections in VMS, they knew very well what they are doing),
I believe there are several incorrect claims here:
- The VMS Scribe was not a professional scribe. He knew how to prepare and handle a quill pen, and must have had a neat enough handwriting when writing Latin or vernacular; but he did not know the basic practices that professional scribes use when writing a book, such as scoring straight, horizontal, and equally spaced baselines, and vertical margin lines at uniform distances from the vellum edges. And the sizes of glyphs and spaces are all over the place. My guess is that his real profession involved writing, but required only clarity, not beauty. Something like student, teacher, doctor, accountant, or writing letters for someone who (like old Marci) could not write them himself. And he obviously had no experience as illustrator.
- He did not understand Voynichese at all. One bit of evidence for this claim is the page where he wrote a text interrupted by a plant as if it was two independent columns of text. The Author must have taught him the set of valid glyphs, and he must have trained writing them until the Author was satisfied with the result; but he probably did not even know how to pronounce them. He would not need to.
- He did make many errors, and left many uncorrected. This is the most likely explanation for the large number of glyphs and glyph combinations that occur only once. And for the variations of symbol shapes in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (although the latter may be better explained by the BEEP BEEP.) Note that the ink he used was not waterproof (see the stain on f103r), and did not soak into the vellum (as it would into paper), so many other mistakes may have been corrected by wiping them off with a damp "Q-tip".
Quote:is this theory based upon the assumption of someone reading and writing from an unprecise draft? ... I find many suggestions here that the VMS was dictated. All r-instead-of-n just being hearing errors now...? However, no one here can answer the question of 'VMS: dictated or hardcopied?'
Very few statements about the VMS are certain. (Even "written in the early 1400s" is dubious. While vacating my office at the Univ I just found a block of FORTRAN coding sheets, of those that were given to keypunch operators, that I bought more than 50 years ago. Like those that Friedman & co must have filled when they transcribed the VMS to punched cards. That's to illustrate the fact that the VMS could easily have been written a century or more after the C14 date of the vellum...)
But my belief is that both alternatives above are true. The original text was first dictated by someone while the Author wrote it down -- on paper -- in his invented phonetic script or shorthand. Many years later, in Europe, the VMS we have now was copied from this draft (or from some revised version thereof) onto vellum by a local Scribe.
The main arguments for this second part are the evidence for the "ignorant scribe" claim above, and the observation that no one would want to write something straight from brain to vellum -- because of the relatively high cost of the latter, and the assumption that errors would be hard to erase and correct (even though that assumption turned out to be false in this case).
Also, clean-copying is slow and boring work. Writing one page of draft, with a rough sketch of a figure, could take 10 minutes. Clean-copying that to vellum and fleshing out the sketch, even with "VMS quality" handwriting and artwork, could take half an hour or more. The Author may have paid the equivalent of $1 per page for the vellum. If he could hire a starving student or idle accountant at $0.50 per page, he may have chosen to do that rather than do it himself.
And he may have been unable to do it himself because he had poor handwriting or (like old Marci) had failing eyesight.
Quote: (17-06-2026, 06:27 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Moreover, if all ir endings are actually iin, the structure of the words becomes significantly simpler. And other things work better too.
ir does not look rather shorter or much easier to write; how can it be a really helpful abbreviation then? This is also a question for all other abbreviation ideas.
I believe that
m is an intentional abbreviation for
iin that the Scribe used when space was tight (like near the end of a line) or when he was feeling lazy. I
don't think
ir is an abbreviation for
iin, but rather a Scribal error.
By "things would be simpler" I am referring to You are not allowed to view links.
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Q^q D^d X^x H^h G^g X^y D^e N^n
where
Q = { q }, D = { d, l, r, s }, X = { Ch Sh ee Che She eee },
G = { k, t, p, f, ke, te }, H = { CKh, CTh, CPh, CFh, CKhe, CThe, CPhe, CFhe }
N = { n, in, iin, iiin, ir, iir }
and there are restrictions like q being either 0 or 1, h + g either 0 or 1 (that is, at most one gallows), q+d+e+n <= 3, x+h+y <= 2. Note that r is the only glyph that appears both in the D set and in the N set. If
ir and
iir are "quillos" for
iin and
iiin, the N set becomes just { n, in, iin, iiin }, and each glyph belongs to exactly one of the sets.
Quote:Why could it be useful to even reduce complexity and do things better then?
Whether there are or not errors will not depend on what we like it or not...
If there are indeed many errors, attempts to solve the riddle that do not recognize that possibility will necessarily fail.
Anyone who has tried to transcribe the VMS knows that the Scribe often produced ambiguous glyphs and spaces. Spaces that may or may not be word breaks, glyphs that are halfway between
e and
i, or between
r and
s, or between
d and
g... Sometimes transcribers will mark those as ambiguous, with comma instead of period and with [r|s] or similar notations. But in many cases the transcriber will toss a coin, meaning that he will often get it wrong. And the existence of those ambiguous forms suggests that many glyphs that do look definitely like
r were meant to be
s, and so on.
And if the
Scribe can produce such ambiguous forms in the clean copy, why wouldn't the
Author write many more ambiguous signs on his draft, which the Scribe would then often get wrong?
In fact, assuming the possibility of numerous errors may even make all sorts of analysis simpler. For instance, if one suspects that final
a may be a scribal error for
y, even if only some of the time, it would be prudent to map
all final
a to
y and count them together, rather than count each separately. Collapsing the two will lose some information that may or may not be important, but keeping them separate will make tables longer, and contaminate both counts with an unknown amount of noise.
All the best, --stolfi