I see that there is the thread [font=Alegreya, serif]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on the voynich.ninja which discusses depiction of this page in the context of Winds, in particular, in the Ptolemaic system. I think that here, in the forum, must be a thread about the page f86v3 to collect all thought about its imagery in different conexts. [/font] [font=Alegreya, serif]This post includes observations on different myths containing scenes with birds and mountains, as well a part of my theory.[/font] During the study I was often surprised with that fact that many myths from different corners of the globe repeat the same stories, sometimes modified, but in the same time, include almost identical details and characters. The issue of my interest is not an exception: most part of myths about the Water of Life or the Water of Immortality includes episodes with a mountain or two mountains and birds, often – an eagle, a dove, a phoenix and a raven. I couldn’t ignore such a detail because of the same motive of the page f86v3 which contain two mountains (or a mountain and a volcano) at the bottom and certain watery or bubbling shapes (not mountains) ejecting likely fumes or mist. Birds always help to get the living water for gods and people:
an eagle and doves brought Ambrosia to Zeus helping him to win his father Cronus;
an eagle threw You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. plant to some mountain from heaven or brought it from the mountain to earth;
there are You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about birds (eagles or doves, etc.) which brought the living water flying between two clashing rocks, as no man can do it.
As for the image of a bird (eagle, pelican, or phoenix) on a mountain in alchemy, it has no one exact meaning, since there are too many different details in alchemy which play important role in identification. For example, the white eagle means the White stone or Elixir, phoenix means achievement of successful final of the Great Work – rebirth as the Philosopher’s Stone. In general, birds in alchemy mean volatility, volatile state of the material. According to one alchemical author, «the eagle flies up to the clouds and receives the rays of the sun in his eyes.» The text of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.says that the first Hermes built the house at the mountain of the Moon opposite the Sun to observe the level of the Nile’s waters. They say, there was five Hermeses, obviously, this implies his five incarnations. Alchemical works sometimes mention one mountain (of adepts), it can be a one- or twin-peaked mountain, but often two mountains (Sol and Luna) are mentioned. The Voynich folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. contains two «mountains» and two birds, possibly, eagles, one of them is sitting on the peak of the rock, another is descending from above. Descending bird almost always means the Holy Spirit. I have an impression that the left mountain here is humid or watery, ejectin moisture in opposition to the right which is, rather, of earth and accepting humidity.
This post has been triggered by two recent comments by Diane. This first of these in a recent You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , but I did not want to disturb that discussion with something off-topic.
I would like to caution people against being misled by the following statement You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. :
Quote:It would also be the civil thing to do to run a google search and acknowledge the first person(s) to suggest similarities that you repeat in your paper. If only everyone did that it would save a lot of embarrassment and no-one could possibly suggest you'd just 'lifted it'.
Anyone writing in a blog post about their original thoughts and original work should not need to worry about this. Every blog poster knows very well what is their original work and what has been copied from elsewhere. The latter should be indicated.
It only becomes a problem if anyone says that he/she is the first to do or write a certain thing. This is almost impossible to prove, so one should be very careful in writing such things. I did not read the entire blog of "Searcher" so cannot say if this problem occurs.
If one posts original work, one should not expect to be accused of 'lifting' it. The fault lies with the person making the accusations.
Equally importantly, a "Google search" is inadequate for finding out about earlier work. This was also discussed briefly in Nick's blog, just a few days ago. As useful as it is for finding things, the result is not representative for the complete picture, and gives only a tiny fraction of relevant information.
To know the history of research in any topic, one has to do a thorough literature search. This is usually outside the possibilities of someone who is not already involved in this research, because one has to start from scratch, and most important resources are not to be found by a Google search, but only in libraries and archives. Or one has them already since one is more or less deeply involved.
For the Voynich MS there are many archives like the Beinecke, the Grolier Club, the Marshall library, and numerous other repositories of correspondence. None of these can be read through Google. Again, this is only a real problem if one wants to claim to be the first in something. Still, one misses a lot of interesting, and potentially useful information.
Therefore, the suggestion to use Google to find out about precedence is not a good one, for two reasons:
1 - you know yourself (and don't need to ask Google) what is your original work
2 - Google gives you a useless answer.
Fortunately, for the Voynich MS, these archives have already been searched by different people, and one can find bits and pieces of useful information in books like D'Imperio (1978) and Brumbaugh (1978). The first is even available on-line as a PDF, but not searchable, so again Google is no help.
All of this is true for blog posts, but a completely different regime applies for academic publications. Here, one cannot just write about a topic and not worry about what others have written. One has to demonstrate that one is familiar with the state of the art of this topic. This is especially important if one wants to present an alternative to what is 'best knowledge'. So, you don't only quote people who do the same thing, but also those you are intending to contradict, if these are important.
More often than not, demonstrating this knowledge is not an issue if the author is a known authority in the field, or, if it is a relative newcomer, by having such an authority as co-author.
The second post of the two I mentioned in the beginning demonstrates some of these points. It is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . I wasn't going to comment on it, but it fits in perfectly with this issue.
The statements:
Quote:Apart from some vague observations which were acute enough but undeveloped (such as a couple of John Tiltman's), there was no informed comment on this imagery between 1912 and 1931, when Anne Nill made a note of some offered by Panofsky. Once again there was no explanation in detail for those observations, though that doesn't lessen their importance as the first unforced, informed commentary we have.
Thereafter there appears to have been nothing recorded of any informed observation or comment on the imagery before 2008.
are plainly incorrect. (I put an effort to avoid terminology that would not be in line with forum policy).
However, this could be the impression one gets from relying on a Google search, and not bothering to look at literature, some of which is easily available.
I was going to post it here, but in the end it turned out to be a too big material, so I've finally decided to make a new blog and to place my whole theory concerning the VMs imagery there. Here is only the introduction and synopsis.
Due to my new observations on the Voynich MS, I can continue my «lunar» theory which was begun with observations on the hidden signs of the lunar cycle in the herbal part of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. You can find it You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I agree it looks unconvincing in the interpretation of quite obscure signs. Now it has grown from a separate observation into a more or less complete idea.
This idea is about the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I don’t want to say it is new, but my aim is to represent how it can be explained entirely. Actually the matter is about the «living water» from the Moon. I think the whole conception of the VMs is the doctrine about influences of the Moon on the Earth water, plants and moistures of all bodies, about moisture and vapors of the Moon as the nature of its influence.
I don’t know whether my observations and conclusions will help in deciphering of the text or will more confuse, as, it seems, I haven’t found the answer to the question about the language in which the Voynich manuscript is written.
1. Analysis of patterns in the Voynich MS imagery.
2. Image of the Moon in the view of ancient and medieval people.
3. The Eagle and the Mountain.
4. The Water of the Moon: a divine liquid of immortality or the principle of reincarnation?
--Soma and Samsara.
--Ambrosia and metempsychosis.
--Manichean «Navis vitalium aquarum».
--Alchemical transformation: the White elixir as the way to the Redness.
--The Voynich pools of life-giving waters.
5. The place of the Voynich MS in the «Lunar» theory.
6. «Rosettes» – Ros – Ras – Aqua Vitae.
This is the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Please, use the direct link, Google Search doesn't work for it as I use free version Wordpress.
P. S. Koen, thanks for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It came just at the right moment.
Just on a whim I made the following image which shows the direction of the labels on the large foldout. The arrows always point to the top. So on a normal page (like this webpage) we would expect only upwards pointing arrows.
"Radial" labels, which are arranged as or along a circle, are marked in black.
Taking the orientation of the scan as the norm: GREEN arrows mark normal text. RED arrows mark upside down text. YELLOW arrows mark text which can be read when you turn the map 90° counter-clockwise BLUE arrows mark text which can be read when you turn the map 90° clockwise PINK arrows mark transitional directions.
What this diagram shows is that there appears to be a clockwise "flow" throughout the foldout which is followed rather consistently. I'm not sure what this means and I'm left with plenty of qiestions.
Does it show that the thing was meant to be rotated in one's hand?
Does it show the preferred orientation of specific parts?
Are there other documents which show this kind of behavior? (there are a few other pages in the VM)
In linguistics, Heaps' law (also called Herdan's law) is an empirical law which describes the number of distinct words in a document (or set of documents) as a function of the document length (so called type-token relation).
Heaps' law means that as more instance text is gathered, there will be diminishing returns in terms of discovery of the full vocabulary from which the distinct terms are drawn. More on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
To put this another way, the vocabulary size in any textual stream grows according to Heaps law: it is proportional to the square root of the total number of tokens in the stream.
So if the Voynich is based on an underlying natural language text - if the word tokens we observe actually have unique meanings - then it should correspond to Heap's Law, which has extensively shown to exist in many different natural languages.
If the word tokens do not have unique meanings - ie, this is gibberish or tokens are actually comprised of morphemes with different meanings - then we should not observe Heap's Law.
I used the edu-texts-analyzer (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) to run a test on the Voynich.
I prepared two distinct corpus using the Voynich freie literature You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., one of Currier A and the other of Currier B. I attach the transcripts, which were cleared up by turning . into spaces, and removing line end / paragraph markers.
CurrierA contained 11,558 total words of which 3487 were unique.
CurrierB contained 25,489 total words of which 4710 were unique.
Both of these results strongly correspond with the result predicted by Heap's Law, as shown in these two charts (in both cases the small line going from zero to a point shows the position of our result, against the line which Heap's Law plots):
I attach two spreadsheets with the sorted words in both Currier variants, sorted according to their frequency of occurrence.
Comparison with random text
I used an online You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to generate gibberish to run the same tests against. The Heap's results fitted exactly with the prediction. I assume this is because the webpage -and most of its ilk - attempt to mimic the English language when producing its gibberish.
So I then put that random text into a markov chain randomizer found You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. This produced truly random text. I ran several attempts and none produced any results that were anywhere near a Heap's regression line.
However, all text produced very jerky Zipf's like results. Here's a typical chart.
These rapid tests should not be relied upon for any real conclusions, but they do seem to point towards Voynichese tokens having unique individual identities. There is more work to be done in analysing random and cipher texts, but I hope the tools I include in this post may help other researchers carry out their own tests.
After a decade, I see three major issues which seem to occupy a blind-spot in the study.
I don't mind whether it becomes a discussion, but I'd like members to think about these things in terms of the different approaches to treating the script, text, imagery, codicology, and questions of whether the text is, or isn't in cipher.
WHY?
Contemporary historians (as such) tend to have little time for this question, since in historical terms the answer to one 'why' is potentially infinite, and only leads to other 'why?' questions. On the other hand, all the disciplines chiefly interested in explaining why things are as they are expect to provide, and to be provided with discussions which recognise, enunciate and then carefully explain the 'why' of things.
I find, especially, that linguists are trying to explain why Voynichese works as it does and in their own way cryptologists are too. The same concern is paramount in my work as a comparative iconographer (I hate the word 'iconologist'). This I see as a major problem with the way the imagery is treated. It is not enough to say 'what' you think you see in an image, or 'what' you think it looks like. The picture has to be explained as a whole, and that means explaining (not hypothesising) the reason that it is drawn in the style it is, and explaining (not guessing) its purpose - the 'why' of its being made.
The second is the 'How' of the study overall. Methodology is the essence of science; method is central to discussions of script and language. But when it comes to talking about supposedly historical narratives, or talking about the pictures, I'd have to say that in the past ten years where methodology is concerned it has been ranging between the deeply flawed and the non-existent Methodology is more than 'being methodical' - it means studying the formal methodology of the discipline in question. Theorising about how to conduct a lab. experiment, or how to identify significant elements in a written text, or in a picture just won't do. Really. Plausibility is too low a standard - right results are gained by knowing appropriate means and methods.
That's the HOW.
'How Much'? Researchers tend not to spend enough time determining the relative weight of things which have been said against the hard evidence from which the ideas derive, as distinct from how many people all think and say the same thing.
Scrutinising carefully the evidence for *everything* taken for granted by others is most likely to break the 100 year deadlock. Because - let's face it - nobody has managed to read the text yet, have they? All the current theories, speculations and all the rest must be flawed in some way, and most likely flawed from the foundations upwards. How much should you take as a 'given' and use as basis for your own work? No one can tell you that, but it's worth taking time to make a list of all those things you take for granted: say, that the manuscript was made in Europe, or that the botanical folios were intended to be some sort of European-style herbal, or that the picture of a crossbowman in one roundel of the calendar makes the whole manuscript German... Where are the calendar 'nymphs' in a German calendar? Where are pictures of this style in a Latin (western European) herbal?
How much can you really take 'on faith'? I'd say very, very little. Same premises, same results, and so far the results are... zilch.
Anyway, think about it.
Also - think about what it does to the idea of shared intelligence if you block everything said by another member.
Let us say that the text is assumed to be gibberish.
How could we prove this? What level and type of text analysis could we carry out?
Note: I'm not arguing that it is. I'm asking for thoughts on how we could prove that it is, were we so inclined, as this could bring up some interesting new angle of textual attack.
David and I had a great chat with Nick Pelling about a range of Voynich related topics. These include how he got into Voynich research, his views on how the study has progressed and how to advance it, and much more.
The interview can be viewed below. By now we've ironed out the technical difficulties that were plaguing our earlier interviews
EDIT:
Transcription of the first part:
- David: Hello and welcome to this Voynich Ninja web chat with Nick Pelling. Nick is a well known author whose book "Curse of the Voynich" is very widely read and respected. He's also a well know cipher enthusiast who blogs from ciphermysteries.com.
(skipping rest of intro)
-David: Nick, I'm going to start off with an easy question: how did you first learn about the VM?
- Nick: well, that's a computer game question. Many years ago, I was writing computer games and I got a bit bored of it and started writing a novel. The novel had knights templars and Opus Dei and all kinds of things that nobody had heard of back then - it was quite fun. Then a friend of mine said: "oh, Nick, you're into this history stuff, can you check the backstory for my game?". This was Charles Cecil, who was writing the game Broken Sword. His backstory had all the usual nonsense: pyramids, infinite power, Freemasons... And one of the things he used was the Voynich manuscript. And I thought: that's odd, I thought I knew all about ciphers since I'd always been interested, but I hadn't heard of the Voynich at that point. So I wanted to have a look at it.
Six months later I came back to it and I was hooked. Pretty much the first thing I thought was: here's something that could really benefit from clear thinking. I really want to do this. And I haven't stopped writing, cause the Voynich is just too interesting. It couldn't compete. (This was about 2001)
- Koen: I imagine you couldn't find too much online at that point.
- Nick: No, there wasn't much at all. I had the copy-flow from Beinecke, a blue colored black and white thing, you could never quite read stuff on it. But we made do, and the Voynich list was actually very good back then, so that was a very good source of information - and interesting people!
- Koen: would you say that back in the day, there was more of a feeling like "everything is still up for grabs, for us to discover", while now the feeling is more "everything has been written already"?
- Nick: I disagree with any of that really. Back then, the main feeling was one of a shared community; it was quite small, compact, coherent. You had two Jims, Jim Reed and Jim (?) and Jacques Guy, and Rene and Gabriel Landini and a whole load of people who were all into it and were all smart, and not really fighting at all. It was a different sort of vibe to what we have nowadays, and it was really great.
- David: I think we've got to a stage now where we've discovered everything that's easy to discover in the MS and it would take a good amount of academic research to progress from that. Would you agree to that, or do you think there's still easy balls out there?
- Nick: I think there's tons of stuff that really needs to be looked at urgently. People keep writing papers and assuming things as if we know everything. We've made a lot of observations of scans, but we haven't really made all the scans we can. For example, just look at the last page. It's the lowest hanging fruit of the whole MS, cause it's not in code, it's not in cipher; it's just a mess. Now, someone could very easily take that to pieces in terms of what was being written there, what were the different layers, what was amended, how it was constructed. A real forensic codicology job. At that point we'd have a whole load of really basic things, that we could compare to other texts, othr manuscripts. We'd have a language, and we could say this was written in this dialect, in this place... and then we could go to the archives and go, OK, let's have a look, let's find all the other instances of this language in this place and broaden our minds. All of a sudden we'd have a very different kind of conversation, by that single page. This single page seems to me, because it's got Voynichese on it, to have been written at the very time that the author wrote the manuscript, perhaps even by the author himself. That's the biggest thing you would want with any kind of mystery, you would try to get as close to the point of composition as you can.
- Koen: Right, so you say that what we are missing to really get to the bottom of this is someone doing more studies on the physical manuscript itself?
- Nick: exactly. That one page! That one page is a really good example of a non-cryptographic mystery. There isn't any doubt in my mind that it's not cryptographic. I think what's happened in that page as I said in "curse" in 2006 and before, is that this page got fainter and fainter and fainter. And then someone came along, not realizing that in 400 years' time we'd be able to enhance everything with computers. And they saw this faded page, and they said, "let me try and fix it", and they've written over the top of it with their best guesses of what they could see. Unfortunately it's ended up a mess. I'd be entirely unsurprised if the person who was trying to fix it up didn't actually know the language in the first place and was just making best guesses. So it's a multilayered codicological mess. And yet people continue to write *slaps table in frustration* papers on it about billy goat livers and all the rest of it. And that's great, I mean it's lovely that they've been involved and they've tried, but but they just are skipping the difficult thing, which is how do you physically read it? Not how to interpret it, but how to physically read it in the first place. Just having high res scans from Beinecke is partially enabling, but in this case it's just not quite good enough.
- Koen: if you look at it on the surface and you compare it to marginalia in other MS, it's still really difficult.
- Nick: Unlike the rest of the Voynich, I don't believe this is a cryptographic mystery. That one page. I believe that what we're looking at is layers of historical interpretation.
- Koen: so you think someone messed it up?
- Nick: Yeah, but with good spirit! Trying to do their best. But what codicology is all about is taking things that are hard to read and using physical imaging techniques to separate out the layers.
You can have what's called "glancing illumination", where you shine light really close to the surface, so you can see the indentations - you can't see the colors - where the strokes are made, on a really microscopic level. That shows you what was written. You can look at the width of the strokes and reconstruct the layers of contributions that make up the page.
And at that point, we can start talking about billy goat livers and all the wonderful things that people have suggested. But until that point, it's just premature, which is a shame. There are things that we know we should know, that we really should be looking at. But there seems to be an assumption that we have everything, and we don't.
- David: we've been talking about marginalia, especially the last page, quite a bit on the forums. There seems to be a consensus from different researchers that it's Middle Highe German of some sort. You've said before that you think you can read a name "Simon" in it. Do you still think that?
- Nick: I don't see why not. The top line has sections that seem messed around with.
- David: the previous page, you mention the part you suspect that contains a colophon from the author, why do you think that?
- Nick: if you look at all the preceding pages in quire 20, what you see is lots of short, starred paragraphs, of a certain rhythmic format. Fast forward to 116r, and we have this end paragraph. We know this is the end because the following page is blank. If you look at that final paragraph, there's a nice big gap, a nice ornate gallows at the top and a very awkward looking first word and then a whole bunch of text which doesn't look at all like the kind of text on preceding pages. And it's the very last thing that's written. That is normally where you put a colophon. If we want to understand quire 20, perhaps we should not use that last paragraph.
Even if we can't read individual words, we still should be smart enough to read the flow of the document as a whole, and just work out what the bigger picture is.
- David: talking about that, have you made any progress on your block paradigm?
- Nick: in code breaking generally there are two types of attack: one where you try to attack the system (working backwards). You can also do a forward attack; if you find out what the plaintext is, you can work forwards from there to the ciphertext.
In WWII this happened all the time. Messages were often sent through different channels, so you have an enigma channel, and let's say the Japanese ambassadore (?) channel. The same message would diverge in two paths. You might be able to break this one, but not the other one. So if you can break this one, you have a different way of attacking the other one. A forward attack from a known plaintext.
Now, in the case of the VM, it is a bunch of different things, there's no reason for thinking it's a simple shopping list or something. There's the herbal bit, baths bit, astro bit... It seems very likely they've all come from different sources. It's 200 pages of stuff, and the pattern changes.
Koen: It's what we would expect from a manuscript like this.
Nick: yeah, so we don't have a chance of finding a whole plaintext, unless we happen to find "the Voynich Manuscript" in clear somewhere - which is not likely to happen at this point. But at the same time it may well be that if we identify particular documents that have particular structures or particular subjects.
There's a good chance that the last section is a set of recipes, short things. So if we find a document with the same structure there's a good chance we might be able to use it as a known plain text; we might be able to identify a block - a paragraph or a page is enough - to help us look at the Voynich text, how does that map to that? Even a single word would be enough. If you go upwards from a word, maybe a sentence or a paragraph, then you should have everything you need to understand the VM's writing system in every single detail.
- Koen: have you ever found something where you thought: this is my block, this is it?
- Nick: yes I have! For a while I was convinced that I was on the trail of a 15th century recipe book that was going to be the same as quire 20. I pursued it, but in the end I don't believe that there is a good version of it. There are bits of it that are copied into other recipes. That was a strong attempt on my part. But the importance of the block paradigm is using an attack on just a small block. The important thing isn't that we haven't found it yet, the importance is that it gives us a mechanism we can all agree on, I think, that will break the VM. Whatever its language, if we can identify the before and the after we can map it.
It's a way I can suggest to people: this is how we can collectively break the VM. That for me is a revolution, because in a way I can stop worrying about the cipher or the language of the text, and start worrying about how I can work with other people to find the source of these blocks.
- Koen: I agree because even if the craziest, most unimaginable things have been done to the text, we still have a chance of deciphering it.
- Nick: exactly.
- David: so you still think it's definitively a ciphertext, you don't think it's some sort of exotic natural language?
- Nick: I think we can rule out every single natural language. every single one. There's a whole bunch of reasons for it; the language is inconsistent from section to section, it exhibits properties that no single language, however exotic would do. There is evidence of abbreviation, that's different in different sections.
Now, if you don't start by saying "it's natural language but it's abbreviated in some way" - Ah, now we're starting to talk in an interesting conversation! But people kind of shut off, because they tend to see natural language as an either/or thing. Either it's a pure natural language or some other ???? I'm not interested in. That kind of either/or is such weak thinking, such pathetically weak thinking, that we have to do better than that.
It's not a simple cipher, it's not a ???? cipher, I don't believe, it's not a Albertian polialphabetic cipher. We can get rid of all of those three, and at the same time we can also get rid of exotic languages. And we can get rid of random anagrams. We can say exactly what it's not. But until we start to figure out what's on the other side of the wall, we struggle. It's a combination of things, and they contribute in some kind of tangled and clever way. It's probably much simpler than we think.
- David: could it be gibberish?
- Nick: No, no, it's too structured. Someone could not sustain that. For example, quire 13 and quire 20, they use language in different ways. If you look at the starts of words, they're just different. I think that's direct evidence that the system used for Voynichese evolved over time. That's what Currier called Currier A and Currier B.
- Koen: But Currier also linked his A and B to different hands, so if it's for example a transcription effort, it could be that they just transcribed in a different way, which does not imply an evolution over time.
- Nick: I think there's an interesting question to be had. But this is a real.... we're coming into the zone of questions that people haven't asked. Since Currier wrote his papers in the 1970's, too many people have just sat back and said "okay, that's that", but actually that's just the starting point. What annoys me is that even though we've got much better transcriptions than we had 40 years ago, nobody seems to be trying to build on Currier. In fact, the person who most cited Currier is Stephen Bax, and cited him in order to diss him, to put him down. This is madness! The one good piece of work we've got, and Bax starts putting it down. Well no, no no! We have to be better than that. We need to build on this stuff.
- David: What sort of statistical studies do think can be done on the text? And do you think the electronic transcriptions have any value in that, or should we be working off the original text?
- Nick: I think the transcriptions are hugely useful, and EVA is smarter than anybody seems to understand. People seem to have forgotten the point of EVA. Before EVA, everybody had their own transcription, they would fight over just the transcription for weeks. EVA stopped all that... However, people still haven't figured out what the shapes are.
- David: it's still an assumption when people are using these transcriptions, that people think that these are the glyphs in the book, and that's written in stone. There's no attempt to think "well actually, this EVA character may be composed of two glyphs in the book".
- Koen: yeah there could still be parsing errors in EVA which kind of influence the way we think about the characters.
- Nick: there are plenty of those. For example, in "curse" I talked about the flourish on at the end of the [n] character. I pointed out one page where the final strokes were written in a different ink. How's that? Why would the final strokes be written in a different ink? Maybe they were written in a separate pass? Maybe what was originally inscribed on the page was a dot above the [i]'s of [daiin]. There's a medieval cipher where you'd put dots in different positions to identify different characters. And maybe the end stroke was brought down from that dot down to the bottom. Specifically in Currier A, Currier B is different. It was like they said "dots is a giveaway, let's hide it more". And they patched it up, so it's a two stage thing. So it would be really good to examine that page and other pages - there's one in the pharma section - to try and really grasp what's going on there. Cause if that's the case, there's something really funny about these end characters that we're not capturing in our transcription. If that is the case, then we're all over the place, then we're looking at the wrong thing.
Another thing about EVA that's problematic is the issue of spaces and half spaces. This is not going away. I know that Glenn Claston used to complain about the different flourishes on the [sh], that's definitely a thing that should be captured. He captured it in his 101 transcription.
But even with those things, EVA is still very worthwhile. But the problem is that people just assume that we've nailed it, and that's the last word. It's not the last word, it's an early word. It hasn't been backed up by the low-level, detailed codicological studies to try and work out if it actually matches what we see.
- Koen: so it may be like David implied that it might be worthwhile for some people to return to the scans to actually read the text to get a feeling for it again, instead of just relying on a text file with the EVA transcription in it.
- Nick: it's a really good exercise that anyone can do, it costs nothing. Pick a page, any page, and transcribe it yourself. Don't take anyone else's word for it, just try it. Even if you try one paragraph from an A page and one paragraph from a B page, you'll learn more about EVA and how it varies than most of the people talking about EVA. Anyone can go yeah yeah qokedy blablabla, but actually doing the transcription you'll kind of grasp what a task of epic proportion is was for Takahashi and Glenn and others to put their transcriptions together.
- David: probably a lot of work (?) yeah
- Koen: I don't even wanna think about it!
-Nick: exactly! And people wouldn't even try to scan a single page. Just try to do a paragraph and then start talking about EVA. You'll get a hugely different outlook on it.
I want to return for a moment to a comment made by Marco earlier in the thread, where he says
Quote:VMS hobbyists tend to almost exclusively focus on manuscript images. This forum is no exception: in the last month there were 13 active threads in "Imagery" and only 2 in "Analysis of the text". As you know, I discovered the ms through the work of Prof.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., so I have always been interested in the language as well as the illustrations. I am positive about all contributions that seriously examine the Voynichese language.
Just as a matter of the history of this study: Apart from some vague observations which were acute enough but undeveloped (such as a couple of John Tiltman's), there was no informed comment on this imagery between 1912 and 1931, when Anne Nill made a note of some offered by Panofsky. Once again there was no explanation in detail for those observations, though that doesn't lessen their importance as the first unforced, informed commentary we have.
Thereafter there appears to have been nothing recorded of any informed observation or comment on the imagery before 2008.
There had developed a reverse-engineered sort of 'identification': a person with a theory would then point to one detail or another and assert it supported their theory, but again it was not well-grounded and not informed by any effort at analytical discussion of the image-as-image, and no historical perspective or explanation for the *whole* picture on any folio was attempted. In this way we had Pelling's effort to argue that the botanical folios were Averlino's, and then to interpret them as obscured imagery of machinery. Rene occasionally pointed to some detail or other which he thought supported his 'central European' idea - and this led to more errors, such as the assertion that the cloudband was Germanic in some way.
I began publishing analytical treatments of one folio and another - complete with brief historical and contextual notes designed to assist those seeking the Voynich language - from 2009.
In about 2012 (?) you and Darren Worley began trying to re-visit some of my conclusions, including the map which had, in the meantime, attracted a number of efforts to imitate the method while reaching some Euro-centric conclusion.
You and Darren, especially, offered in a very public arena a positive image of the way we must contextualise images from the manuscript, and it was in some ways a relief no longer to be alone.
Thereafter we saw Koen, and then JKP and various others determined to move beyond the style in which the imagery had been treated from 1912 to 2010, and I admit that not everyone now involved produced work that deserves to be described as other than a 'hobby'.
However, I've made no mystery of the fact that I'm not an amateur in the field of comparative iconography - which is rather different from specialising in one tradition or period.
Since you have had so important a role in raising the profile of study for the pictorial text - where for years the attitude was that there was no point to it before the written text was deciphered - I think you should congratulate yourself on having made a real difference to the study in this as in other things.
I am not completely sure I haven't made substantial mistakes. So take this with a grain of salt. Also, I don't know if this has been discussed before.
These graphs represent the expected (red) and actual (green) counts for consecutive words in which the last letter of the first word is the same as the first letter of the second word. For instance (where '.' represent word boundaries):
but.these
others.said
seventh.hour
I considered:
a classical Latin text (De Bello Gallico). 51328 words
early modern English (the gospel of John from King James Bible). 19131 words
a medieval Occitan text (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). 15461 words
medieval Italian (Divine Commedy). 105682 words
VMS - Takahashi's EVA transcription. 37718 words
VMS Currier-D'Imperio transcription, extracted via ivtt. 16120 words
The expected occurrences for each letter occurring as -X.X- is computed in this way:
T is the total number of consecutive word pairs
E is the number of these pairs in which the first word ends with -X
S is the number of these pairs in which the second word starts with X-
The expected number of X.X is T*(E/T)*(S/T)=E*S/T
For instance, in the VMS Takahashi transcription there are 32053 word couples.
In 1082 of these, the first word ends with EVA: -o ( 1082/ 32053 = 3.4%)
In 7315 couples, the second word starts with o- ( 7315/ 32053 = 22.8%)
We expect 22.8% * 2.4% * 32053=247 occurrences of o.o (plotted in red), but we only find 114 actual occurrences (plotted in green).
While all the texts show some degree of difference between expected and actual, I think it is clear that for Latin and English the differences are small and in both directions, while they are much larger for Occitan and Italian and all due to smaller actual counts than expected. This is due to the fact that Occitan and Italian spelling is subject to euphonic transformations that avoid the repetition of the same vowel across word boundaries.
For instance, in Occitan, the final -e of the preposition 'de' is dropped before 'e-' juntturas.de.las.cambas fuelhas.d.erba
The same things happens for the determinative articles: lo.matin l.omme
One can also note that the most apparent shift from expected values in Latin corresponds to a.a. In my opinion, this is due to one of the very few euphonic variants of Latin: the two versions of the preposition a/ab, the second one being used before words starting with a vowel.
a milibus a germanis
ab inimicis ab aliis ab armis
In my opinion, this evidence (if confirmed) could support the word-boundaries transformations discussed by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
It is clear that, if what we observe in the VMS is due to euphonic transformations, these are quite different from those that happen in Latin languages. In these languages, transformations are limited to short and frequent words (mostly prepositions and articles) and typically affect the end of the words. The phenomena discussed by Emma affect longer words and mostly seem to happen at the beginning of words (I am thinking in particular of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on the basis of the ending of the preceding word). [/i]