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Ok, so I have this paper I've been working on and I have a very rough draft on Zenodo. I've decided to put the things I've been digging into on ninja with the hopes that additional pairs of eyes will clue me in to things I've been missing before I make a complete fool of myself and submit it for peer review. For all of these tests, I've used the EVA Takahashi (I'm old and have used it for years) with cross verification of the EVA Zandberg/Landini.
I'm goin to try to break all of this down into multiple posts because I have a bunch of territory to cover. Each will refer back to previous ones. Much of what I'll cover won't be new territory to the old hands at the Voynich. Some, may be.
The bigram "ed"
It's been known for many years that the bigram "ed" is just plain odd. It occurs in the Voynich as a midfix 4,474 times and as a suffix 186 times. Never as a prefix. That may not sound that striking but this chart shows just how striking it is.
That is "ed" compared to the top 100 bigrams by total count and percentage of pages. It occurs on roughly 56% of pages but is in the top 10 for total bigram count (#9).
Currier and "ed"
Currier noticed a difference when he described his language A and language B. He could never quite put his finger on all of the differences between the two. I'll suggest that the big thing he noticed was the bigram "ed".
This chart shows the locations of the bigram "ed" with the background shaded to represent Currier A and Currier B. The dot colors represent blue = no ed bigrams on the page, orange = 1 ed bigram on the page and green 2+ bigrams on the page.
Side note: You'll notice 2 orange dots early in the herbal section You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f11r. In both of those pages, ed occurs once and it's inside a hapax token. The total number of pages where ed only occurs once is 19. Of those 19 pages, it's a hapax token on 6.
So, just from comparing Currier to ed, we see there's a very close match. He apparently never fully defined the zodiac section as either so it has the white background.
"ed" by section
The first thing I noticed was, the first 25 folios only have those 2 occurrences of ed. That seemed pretty odd for a bigram that's one of the top 10 by count. So, I decided to dig further.
"
This chart shows the bigram ed by section. I lumped the ed's into buckets. No ed on the page, 1 ed per page and a low, medium and high bucket that split the ed per-folio count into 3 groups of around 40 pages each. This chart is also normalized by folio word count to show the differences even better than the previous chart. On the left, you'll notice again, the first 25 folios, only the two hapax token ed occurrences. At f26r, ed gets introduced. But not all at once. It skips around between pages with ed and no ed. The pharma section does the same thing. Some have ed, some do not. The same for zodiac. About half either have no ed or 1 ed. Baneo, rosette and recipes all have the highest count and ratio of ed in the entire Voynich.
"ed" by sheet?
Now here's where things get a big strange. I'm not going to interject my theory here. I'm going to be really interested in hearing yours.
I downloaded the quire diagram from Voynich.nu and converted it into a csv that I could import into my python. I then changed the background color to match the quire sheet number. With one exception, 27v, you will notice that all of the pages where the bigram ed is the highest in the herbal section, they're all on the same sheet. But, they're intermixed with sheets that contain no ed.
F26 and F31 are on sheet 2
F33 and F41 are on sheet 1
F34 and F40 are on sheet 2
F41 and F48 are on sheet 1
F43 and F46 are on sheet 3
F50 and F55 are on sheet 1
You can also see a similar pattern in pharma. All have a relatively low ed count with those in the middle having a higher normalized count. Those appear on sheets marked as sheet 1. Again, no theory, but if the Voynich is in some semblance of a chronological order, this, combined with the no ed pages in other sections made me seriously scratch my head.
Which came first?
One thing Dr. Davis has mentioned in some of her talks is that she believes the folios are not in original order (I can't wait to see the results of that!). And looking at these charts, it struck me as interesting that the ed bigram appears to be in clusters and groups. Not so much by region as by quire sheet. Since we truly have no idea what order this book was written in, I developed a theory. Assume that all of the pages where ed never occurred or was in a hapax token where created first and that the bigram ed was brought into prominence later (or the reverse of that). What kind of differences would they have? So, I spit the Voynich into 2 "halves". The 0ed half, which included pages where it never occurred or it occurred once in hapax token, and the ed+ "half" where it occurred at least once and was not in a hapax token.
Here's a csv list of the pages I identified and began classifying as 0ed and ed+ pages.
0ed
f1r,f1v,f2r,f2v,f3r,f3v,f4r,f4v,f5r,f5v,f6r,f6v,f7r,f7v,f8r,f8v,f9r,f9v,f10r,f10v,f11r,f11v,f13r,f13v,f14r,f14v,f15r,f15v,f16r,f16v,f17r,f17v,f18r,f18v,f19r,f19v,f20r,f20v,f21r,f21v,f22r,f22v,f23r,f23v,f24r,f24v,f25r,f25v,f27r,f28r,f28v,f29r,f29v,f30r,f30v,f32v,f35r,f35v,f36r,f36v,f37r,f37v,f38r,f38v,f42r,f42v,f44r,f44v,f45r,f45v,f47r,f47v,f49r,f49v,f51v,f52v,f53r,f53v,f54r,f54v,f56r,f56v,f65r,f67v2,f68r2,f71v,f72r2,f87v,f88r,f89v1,f90r2,f90v1,f90v2,f93r,f93v,f96r,f96v,f99r,f100r,f100v,f101r,f102r2,f102v1,f102v2
ed+
f26r,f26v,f27v,f31r,f31v,f32r,f33r,f33v,f34r,f34v,f39r,f39v,f40r,f40v,f41r,f41v,f43r,f43v,f46r,f46v,f48r,f48v,f50r,f50v,f51r,f52r,f55r,f55v,f57r,f57v,f58r,f58v,f59r,f59v,f60r,f60v,f61r,f61v,f62r,f62v,f63r,f63v,f64r,f64v,f66r,f66v,f67r1,f67r2,f67v1,f68r1,f68r3,f68v1,f68v2,f68v3,f69r,f69v,f70r1,f70r2,f70v1,f70v2,f71r,f72r1,f72r3,f72v1,f72v2,f72v3,f73r,f73v,f74r,f74v,f75r,f75v,f76r,f76v,f77r,f77v,f78r,f78v,f79r,f79v,f80r,f80v,f81r,f81v,f82r,f82v,f83r,f83v,f84r,f84v,f85r1,f85r2,f86v3,f86v4,f86v5,f86v6,f87r,f88v,f89r1,f89r2,f89v2,f90r1,f91r,f91v,f92r,f92v,f94r,f94v,f95r1,f95r2,f95v1,f95v2,f97r,f97v,f98r,f98v,f99v,f101v,f102r1,f103r,f103v,f104r,f104v,f105r,f105v,f106r,f106v,f107r,f107v,f108r,f108v,f111r,f111v,f112r,f112v,f113r,f113v,f114r,f114v,f115r,f115v,f116r
So, this is how I entered the rabbit hole. There's a bit to digest here when you consider the implications so I'll end the post here. But, there's also lots more to pile on top of this so I'll be referring back to this post. I'll be sure to link it when I continue this in a new thread in the near future™.
Thanks for looking it over and I'm eager to hear opinions.
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