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| Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Vol |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 05-05-2020, 08:25 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Lisa Fagin Davis wrote:
Quote:In other news, my paleography article in Manuscript Studies was published a few days ago. It will be available open-access on May 7, I believe
OK, it's not there yet, but I already like the cover of the issue. I would be happy to know which MS it is from.
Edit:
Oops, it's there:
University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, MS Codex 1881, 35v
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| The daiin |
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Posted by: Anton - 03-05-2020, 11:50 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I often quickly forget what was discussed in the forum, and, the more surprising, I'm also in habit of forgetting the discussions in which I myself took most active part. So please excuse me if what I write below was discussed earlier, we'll merge the threads then.
I collated two trails of thought from the gallows intrusion thread - first one, that daiin may be used as a meaningless (?) filler (though any other vord may be as well, of course). The second one, that the beginnings and endings of lines may be particular candidate positions to place fillers in.
So I took ten most frequent vords (daiin, as we know, is the first one on that list), and calculated the percentage of occurrences which correspond to the vord 's in question being the first or the last vord of a line.
The results are below (the counts are based on the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). The first number is the total count, the second number is the count as line-initial, the third number is the count as line-final, and the final number is the percentage of "(line-initial plus line-final)/total".
daiin 864 156 134 33,4%
ol 538 31 47 14,5%
chedy 501 6 38 8,8%
aiin 470 0 34 7,2%
shedy 427 6 20 6,1%
chol 397 19 6 6,3%
or 366 31 20 13,9%
ar 352 5 27 9,1%
chey 344 5 19 7,0%
dar 319 36 47 26,0%
It's seen that daiin exhibits particular (and almost equal) affinity to line beginnings and endings, with one third of its total occurrences being in those positions, while for most other vords of the top ten, excluding only dar, the count does not exceed 15%, and mostly is under 10%.
What about "variations" of daiin, such as dain and daiiin?
dain 211 47 30 36,5%
daiiin 17 2 4 35,3%
That's funny.
I suspect that daiin is a filler indeed, with dain and daiiin being its variations that occupy slightly less and slightly more space, respectively.
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| The gallows intrusion, the baseline jumps and multipass |
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Posted by: Anton - 03-05-2020, 12:03 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I'm quite excited at the examples provided by Rene in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Quote:In my transliteration I have three annotations related to gallows intruding in the line above. There may be more of course. They are here:
f78v, sixth line of the second paragraph: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
f95v2 line 4: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the Beinecke scan is better here)
f95v1, paragraph 2 line 2: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
There is another marginal case in the middle of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where 'something happened': You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
As Rene points out, such cases may be hinting that certain lines were written before others.
The gallows with their loops reaching upwards are good flags to inspect such behavior. Let's call it the "gallows intrusion" for brevity, meaning that the top of the gallows "intrudes" the above line, forcing part thereof to draw apart or to move slghtly upwards in order to avoid interfering with the intruding gallows.
I noted that in all Rene's examples the intruding gallows is in the odd line of the paragraph, while the line suffering from the intrusion is the even line. Which suggests that lines may have been written in alternating order, first odd ones, then even ones.
For the first screening attempt I checked f1r. I placed line numbers for convenience. I found four occurrences of gallows intrusion here, marked with blue ellipses. In the first and fourth occurrences, the whole vord suddenly jumps notably higher (as compared to the preceding vord). In the second and third occurrences, part of the vord (starting, in both cases, with a gallows) jumps higher as compared to the preceding character of the same vord (in both cases it's the glyph o). In all cases the intruding gallows are in odd lines.
There are other occurrences of "jumps", both in even and odd lines, which are not associated with any "intrusions" from the below lines. This suggests that "jumps" may be just a regular habit of the scribe, or/and that they are caused by some other effect, not the effect of alternating the lines in writing.
Of course, more folios need to be examined for this behavior. What do you think? Do I see just what I want to see?
Gallows_intrusion_1r.jpg (Size: 791.38 KB / Downloads: 483)
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| The curious case of a botched Greek to Latin transcription ("Twaetihaoyc") |
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Posted by: Hallfiry - 01-05-2020, 11:05 AM - Forum: Codicology and Paleography
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Back in 1839 or 1840 Jacob Grimm was visited by a man who brought him a transcription of a document from 1120. The Document contained a few unclear words, in particular "Twaetihaoyc". Grimm couldn't decipher it and set it aside. A few years later he came across a print of a better transcription of the original document and found the word was actually the name ΓΩΔΕΦΡΗΔΟΥϹ, Godefredus, and somebody originally transcribed it, who didn't know Greek and thus matched it to the most similar looking Latin letter.
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| How to recombine glyphs to increase character entropy? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 28-04-2020, 08:59 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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As you may or may not know, the character entropy of Voynichese is extremely low. This is caused by a number of phenomena, not in the least by the fact that characters appear in predictable places. For example in EVA if you have [i], it is likely followed by [i] or [n] and preceded by [i] or [a].
Rene posted the following in Marco's thread today:
Quote:- how to recombine glyphs in order to increase entropy? I did some very initial experiments with this that were quite promising, but the number of possible permutations is a big problem here.
This is something I have been exploring as well last year:
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An intuitive example is the following: [aiin] is a unit so common in EVA, where it is written as a series of characters. This might unnecessarily inflate character entropy, so what if we replace [aiin] by a single character?
(Note: I take a humble stance when it comes to statistics and will be happily corrected by those more skilled in the subject.)
What I learned was the following:
- I preferred to use the value h2/h1 because this gives the text's realized h2 as a percentage of its highest possible h2. So very much simplified a text with for example (h2/h1=0.5) reaches 50% of its maximal h2. You cannot compare h2 outright because h1 has to be taken into account as well (at least, this is what I took from Anton's teachings, and it seemed to work out in practice as well).
- My strategy was basically to introduce new characters to replace common letter groups. This did raise h2, but h1 as well since I was inflating the alphabet
- Cumulative changes interact in an unpredictable way. The first couple of changes you make might actually reinforce each other, with all changes combined resulting in a greater h2/h1 increase than the sum of their separate effects. After a while, however, the inflated alphabet takes its toll and I was unable to further raise h2/h1. So in the beginning you might get great results but after a few changes there are already diminishing returns, until you reach a critical point where little to no increase is possible.
These were my findings about replacing glyph groups by new characters:
- Replacing [qo] by something else has little effect. I think this is because the new character is still extremely positionally dependent (it always follows space).
- I was unable to do anything useful with [ee] either.
- Replacing clusters like [aiin], [aiir]... has the highest effect I've found. I-clusters in vanilla EVA transcriptions are a huge burden on character entropy.
- Collapsing benches into one new character each has a great effect. Collapsing benched gallows does not, but combined with collapsing normal benches, the effect is great.
- Collapsing the bigrams [ar, or, al, ol, am] (one of Nick's suggestions) has a decent effect as well.
![[Image: naamloos-1-kopic3abren-1.gif]](https://herculeaf.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/naamloos-1-kopic3abren-1.gif)
Combining the three most effective measures, I was able to raise h2/h1 to a barely acceptable level. However, h2 alone was still much too low.
Removing spaces has an extremely beneficial effect, but I felt uncertain about how "legal" this step was. It is a change of a different order than combining some of EVA's strokes.
Since writing this post I have not had any better ideas... So Rene I wonder what your own experience is and if other members might have ideas.
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