The Voynich Ninja - My thoughts on the VMS

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[quote pid='5685' dateline='1473423347']
MarcoP wrote:

Hi Thomas,
why should not an inflected agglutinative language be enough to explain this?

From Aeneides Book I (much shorter than the VMS):

qui
quibus
quicquid
quid
quidve
quies
quiescit
quietas
quietem
quietum
quin
quinquaginta
quippe
quirinus
quis
quisquam
quisquis

quo
quocirca
quod
quodcumque
quondam
quoque
quorum
quos
quove
[/quote]

__________________________________________________________________________________

What distinguishes Voynichese from this list and from the behavior of letters in natural languages is the lack of positional flexibility.

For example...

In Thomas's chart of 4o- vords, EVA-r, EVA-s, EVA-ell, and EVA-n occur only at the ends of vords, never anywhere else. In contrast, in the Latin qu- list, all the letters at the end appear elsewhere in other words in the list.

In the 4o- list, even the EVA-y glyph is almost exclusively at the end (only a couple of exceptions).

If you were playing Voynich SCRABBLE and the letters "4o" were already on the board, in the leftmost position (against the edge), and you were told that eight letters of the alphabet could only be used at the ends of words and five more could only be used in the middle of words, imagine the difficulty of making words that follow natural language patterns.

Also, words like the following Latin words

quinquaginta
quisquam
quisquis
quicquid
quodcumque
quoque

are not possible to construct in the VMS with a 4o- prefix unless some of the spaces are contrived.

Thanks for the comments, Emma, Stellar and -JKP-.

Emma: I was drawn to that conclusion too about spaces. Some vords like [choldy] seem to appear as [chol dy]. Maybe it is a case of a writer not remembering whether or not to make a space, like when people write "alot" or "some times" in English Smile

Stellar - You have an interesting idea! I was wondering, what is the =1 at the end of those number sequence?

(28-09-2016, 01:44 AM)ThomasCoon Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thanks for the comments, Emma, Stellar and -JKP-.

Emma: I was drawn to that conclusion too about spaces. Some vords like [choldy] seem to appear as [chol dy]. Maybe it is a case of a writer not remembering whether or not to make a space, like when people write "alot" or "some times" in English

Stellar - You have an interesting idea! I was wondering, what is the =1 at the end of those number sequence?

I don't know how long it will take Stellar to see this and answer your question, but in many numerology systems, you add up the individual digits like this... 1 + 7 + 2 = 10, for example, then you take the 10 and break it down by adding the 1 and 0 to get 1. Similarly, if it were 6 + 7 = 13, then you add 1 and 3 to get a final sum or "value" of 4.

-JKP- Wrote:
Quote:MarcoP wrote:

Hi Thomas,
why should not an inflected agglutinative language be enough to explain this?

From Aeneides Book I (much shorter than the VMS):

qui
quibus
quicquid
quid
quidve
quies
quiescit
quietas
quietem
quietum
quin
quinquaginta
quippe
quirinus
quis
quisquam
quisquis

quo
quocirca
quod
quodcumque
quondam
quoque
quorum
quos
quove

__________________________________________________________________________________

What distinguishes Voynichese from this list and from the behavior of letters in natural languages is the lack of positional flexibility.

For example...

In Thomas's chart of 4o- vords, EVA-r, EVA-s, EVA-ell, and EVA-n occur only at the ends of vords, never anywhere else. In contrast, in the Latin qu- list, all the letters at the end appear elsewhere in other words in the list.

If one considers written Latin from medieval manuscripts, quite a few abbreviations tend to appear at the end of words (which is pretty obvious for abbreviations).

See for instance:
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The symbols similar to 4 3 9 ; ~ only appear at the end of words (for -arum, -m, -us, -[q]ue, -ur).
In ms Vat.Lat.410, these abbreviations have no positional flexibility (but other abbreviations appear in different positions, and other scribes used abbreviations differently).

As I wrote above, I don't think that the VMS is written in Latin, but the Latin language and Latin manuscripts can provide useful parallels for some phenomena.

qo- words with EVA:r,s,l in non terminal positions exist in the Voynich ms:
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So I would say that positional flexibility is in some cases limited both in the VMS and in Latin manuscripts.

Thanks for the insight about abbreviations Marco!

This morning I opened the Takahashi transcription and wrote down how often certain characters appear in relation to each other. Here are some of the results:

<l> appears 10,518 times in Takahashi's text. In 5.5 out of 10 times, it appears before <o>, and 3 out of 10 times, it appears before <a>. So 85% of the time that <l> appears in the VMS, it is either in an <al> or <ol> combination.
<r> appears 7456 times. In 3251 of those cases, it is in an <ar> combination, and in 2897 cases it appears in <or>. So, 82% of the time in the entire VMS, <r> is in one of these two clusters.
<d> appears 12,973 times. In 6876 cases, it is followed by <y>.
<k> appears 10,934 times, but in 6206 cases (the majority of the time) it comes after <o>.
<t> appears 6944 times in the entire VMS, but in 3914 of those usages it comes after <o>.

I hope this will illustrate why I believe there are 2-letter combinations in the Voynich Manuscript.

I also wonder what these statistics mean for a linguistic analysis - many of the "consonants" are severely restricted in ways that are unusual for most (but not all) natural languages.

(28-09-2016, 11:38 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

So I would say that positional flexibility is in some cases limited both in the VMS and in Latin manuscripts.

I absolutely agree that positional flexibility is limited in Latin manuscripts, but this restriction applies mainly to the Latin abbreviations rather than the position of the letters themselves. Individual letters can be found in almost any position, and not every word in Latin (or other languages) is abbreviated. There is much greater variation than in the VMS.

If only the beginnings and endings were positionally restricted in the VMS, then it would be patterned similar to Latin and other languages that use beginning/end abbreviation conventions and midword variation would resemble natural-language patterns more closely.

But the VMS is unusually strict in how within-word glyphs are positioned as well, far beyond the way it occurs in most languages. This rigidity is not common and is difficult to explain in terms of natural language patterns unless (and there will always be this "unless") the spaces are contrived. If the spaces are contrived then the positional rigidity significantly diminishes. If the spaces are not contrived, then the patterns and glyph positions are more systematic than natural.

At one point about three years ago, I charted letter-position in about 40 different languages and compared them to the VMS and none of them were as positionally rigid as the VMS, even when allowing for the possibility that some of the glyphs that resemble Latin abbreviation symbols in the VMS might also be abbreviations in Voynichese. There were only a handful of languages that behaved in a similar way, mostly Asian, Turkic (I'm using that word generically in the broad sense since migrations established some of the language characteristics in other areas), and some African languages.

The only way I could find commonalities with Latin and other western languages was by ignoring spaces and allowing glyph-combinations to represent more than one abbreviation and even then, the within-word rigidity was still more than one would expect from western languages.

(28-09-2016, 05:55 PM)ThomasCoon Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

I hope this will illustrate why I believe there are 2-letter combinations in the Voynich Manuscript.

I do too. I have for a long time.

The problem is that not all the glyphs appear to follow this pattern. It looks like monoglyphs, diglyphs, and possibly even some triglyphs may all have been used, and it also appears as if some of the diglyphs might function as monoglyphs in certain positions (the "o" being one example). I've been wrestling with unsnarling this alphabet soup and it hasn't been easy.

(28-09-2016, 07:35 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do too. I have for a long time.

The problem is that not all the glyphs appear to follow this pattern. It looks like monoglyphs, diglyphs, and possibly even some triglyphs may all have been used, and it also appears as if some of the diglyphs might function as monoglyphs in certain positions (the "o" being one example). I've been wrestling with unsnarling this alphabet soup and it hasn't been easy.

I agree 110%.

It is actually striking - I've worked independently and concluded all of those exact points (hence my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. thread). Please don't let my statistics fool you: I don't believe everything is digraphs either. In my opinion there are also monographs, most likely <d>, <y>, <s>, and also some trigraph patterns (tentatively I'm considering <che>, <oke>, <ote>).

Surprisingly I also believe that some diglyphs may function as monglyphs, and exactly as you said, I also believe it has something to do with <o>:

<od> = <d>?
<ot> = <t>?
<ok> = <k>?
<os> = <s>?

(Or maybe these are 8 separate patterns that all encode a different letter. I am familiar with the "Alphabet soup" that you mentioned because I have been swimming in it also.)

What are your thoughts?

Here is a better version of the statistics from the last post, and I also searched with/without spaces:

(With spaces):

<l> appears 10,518 times in Takahashi's text. In 5.4 out of 10 times (5693 cases), it appears before <o>, and about 3 out of 10 times (3091 cases), it appears before <a>.
So almost 85% of the time that <l> appears in the VMS, it is either in an <al> or <ol> combination.
<r> appears 7456 times. In 3244 of those cases, it is in an <ar> combination, and in 2820 cases it appears in <or>.
So, 81% of the time in the VMS, <r> is either in an <ar> or <or> combination.
<d> appears 12,973 times. In 6850 cases, it is followed by <y>.
<k> appears 10,934 times, but in 6120 cases it is in the combination <ok>.
<t> appears 6944 times in the entire VMS, but in 3884 of those times it is in the combination <ot>.
<q> appears 5423 times in the entire VMS, but in 5290 (97.5%) of those times it is in the combination <qo>.
<qo> appears 5290 times in the entire VMS, but in 3116 of those times the next letter is <k>, and in 1130 cases, the next letter is <t>.
So 80% of the time that <qo> appears, it is in a <qok> or <qot> combination.

(Without spaces):

<l> appears 10,518 times in Takahashi's text. In 5.5 out of 10 times (5837 cases), it appears before <o>, and in 3 out of 10 times (3097 cases), it appears before <a>.
So 85% of the time that <l> appears in the VMS, it is either in an <al> or <ol> combination.
<r> appears 7456 times. In 3251 of those cases, it is in an <ar> combination, and in 2897 cases it appears in <or>.
So, 82% of the time in the VMS, <r> is either in an <ar> or <or> combination.
<d> appears 12,973 times. In 6876 cases, it is followed by <y>.
<k> appears 10,934 times, but in 6206 cases it is in the combination <ok>.
<t> appears 6944 times in the entire VMS, but in 3914 of those cases it is in the combination <ot>.
<q> appears 5423 times in the entire VMS, but in 5290 (97.5%) of those times it is in the combination <qo>.
<qo> appears 5290 times in the entire VMS, but in 3118 of those times the next letter is <k>, and in 1130 cases, the next letter is <t>.
So 80% of the time that <qo> appears, it is in a <qok> or <qot> combination.

Thomas, thank you for saying with numbers what I've been trying to say with words (I have the numbers too, although it's for my own transcription which differs slightly from the TT transcription) but so many people are scared off by numbers, I was reluctant to post them. I'm glad you did. Sometimes it's the only way to say it.

(01-10-2016, 07:12 PM)ThomasCoon Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Here is a better version of the statistics from the last post, and I also searched with/without spaces:

(With spaces):

<l> appears 10,518 times in Takahashi's text. In 5.4 out of 10 times (5693 cases), it appears before <o>, and about 3 out of 10 times (3091 cases), it appears before <a>.
So almost 85% of the time that <l> appears in the VMS, it is either in an <al> or <ol> combination.

<r> appears 7456 times. In 3244 of those cases, it is in an <ar> combination, and in 2820 cases it appears in <or>.
So, 81% of the time in the VMS, <r> is either in an <ar> or <or> combination.

<d> appears 12,973 times. In 6850 cases, it is followed by <y>.

<k> appears 10,934 times, but in 6120 cases it is in the combination <ok>.

<t> appears 6944 times in the entire VMS, but in 3884 of those times it is in the combination <ot>.

<q> appears 5423 times in the entire VMS, but in 5290 (97.5%) of those times it is in the combination <qo>.

<qo> appears 5290 times in the entire VMS, but in 3116 of those times the next letter is <k>, and in 1130 cases, the next letter is <t>.
So 80% of the time that <qo> appears, it is in a <qok> or <qot> combination.

(Without spaces):

<l> appears 10,518 times in Takahashi's text. In 5.5 out of 10 times (5837 cases), it appears before <o>, and in 3 out of 10 times (3097 cases), it appears before <a>.
So 85% of the time that <l> appears in the VMS, it is either in an <al> or <ol> combination.

<r> appears 7456 times. In 3251 of those cases, it is in an <ar> combination, and in 2897 cases it appears in <or>.
So, 82% of the time in the VMS, <r> is either in an <ar> or <or> combination.

<d> appears 12,973 times. In 6876 cases, it is followed by <y>.

<k> appears 10,934 times, but in 6206 cases it is in the combination <ok>.

<t> appears 6944 times in the entire VMS, but in 3914 of those cases it is in the combination <ot>.

<q> appears 5423 times in the entire VMS, but in 5290 (97.5%) of those times it is in the combination <qo>.

<qo> appears 5290 times in the entire VMS, but in 3118 of those times the next letter is <k>, and in 1130 cases, the next letter is <t>.
So 80% of the time that <qo> appears, it is in a <qok> or <qot> combination.

A complex numbers game and yes <qo> =1

Quote:It's easy to add

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