The Voynich Ninja

I have been studying the text of the Stars (or Recipes) section for a few months now. One interesting part which I have noticed and not yet managed to explain is the bottom half of page f108v.

There are two things that make this half page interesting:

1) The stars here, unlike elsewhere in the same section, are linked to the beginnings of paragraphs by short lines. The illustrator clearly understood something was different about these paragraphs.
2) The text statistics of these paragraphs are rather different from the rest of the section.

The difference in the text statistics for these paragraphs can be broken down into two features.

The first is simply that no instance of [p] or [f] occur there, when we might expect to see one or more on the first line of each paragraph. The other is that there is only one instance of a gallows letter at the beginning of a line, and that not even the beginning of a paragraph where they often occur.

Given that both these features are usually seen in the text, and that they both occur in the same part of the text (first line of a paragraph), their absence is likely to be linked. It seems that whatever process normally puts these characters in their usual place has been omitted for this short part of the section.

I do not know why the process has been omitted (beyond speculation) but it is important that it 1) can be omitted, and 2) that the writer (or at least illustrator) is aware of the fact. It is suggestive that if the Voynich text can be written without these features then they are not core parts of the underlying language, or simply not linguistic at all.

Sadly there is a gap in the manuscript at this point so we do not know how long this different kind of text goes on for.

Does anybody have any thoughts on this?

Hi Emma,

As I discuss in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I think that the scribe felt the necessity of these explicit linking lines due to the fact that the lines are placed close to one another, and without them it is not easy for the reader to figure out which line is actually the beginning of the paragraph (which a given star refers to), because the last line of the preceding paragraph is full-length.

BTW, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. demonstrates still more curious way of linking.

As for the p and f, there are other paragraphs in the Recipe section without them (e.g. the 4th paragraph of f108v).

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The folio numbers seem to be automatically parsed into hyperlinks to Jason Davies's site in our forum, so you need not wrap them in URL tags.

Also, please correct the thread title: 180 -> 108

Thank you for the headsup about the page links and the misspelt title.

A similar point came up for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the other day. Both the bottom half of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the top two thirds of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are mostly right-justified text without the usual indications of short paragraphs.
On f08v the stars are indeed linked by short lines (thanks I had never paid much attention to that), while on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. this is no longer the case. Apart from that, the text looks visually similar.
How certain can we be that these are collections of short paragraphs, and not larger sections of running text? The end of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (i.e. the end of the recipes section as we have it) also has a large block, and here there are no further stars.
Apart from the obvious shorter last line of all paragraphs, there also tends to be a slightly larger spacing between lines. These are both missing in the two blocks. The 'initials' that are usually found (largish gallows character) are also completely missing. Finally, the Eva-p and -f are largely missing, though this is not necessarily evidence. It is just a consistent observation.

One unkown is whether there should have been another bifolio in between. In one analysis I did many years ago:
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(especially the first large linked plot) the bifolio of 108 and 111 stands out compared with its surrounding ones, and is more similar to 103 and 116, while in an earlier case:
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the bifolio 107+112 also seems similar. This still requires a deeper analysis, and there is clearly something still to be discovered here.