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| Lipogrammatic text |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 15-04-2021, 01:45 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (35)
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A lipogram or a lipogrammatic text is a piece of writing in which the author deliberately avoids the use of a certain letter (or possibly letters, although this is not typical), using only words that do not contain that particular letter (or letters).
The concept goes all the way back to the Ancient Greek author Lasus of Hermione in the 6th century B.C., who wrote poems using only words that did not contain the letter sigma. This concept has reappeared in literature from time to time over the course of the three millennia since then. It would not be an unknown or unfamiliar concept to an early 15th century European author or student.
If taken to the extreme, lipogrammatic text could possibly explain some of the extremely unusual statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text. Naturally it would likely require the avoidance of more than just one letter to achieve anything close to the extremely low entropy and conditional entropy values found in the Voynich ms text. The purpose of most historical literary lipograms was not to lower the entropy values of their texts, and I doubt the statistical analysis of actual historical literary examples of lipogrammatic text would find extremely low entropy values. But if the author of the Voynich ms carried this process to a certain extreme, it could be one part of the explanation for the statistical properties of the text that we observe.
For example, if an English writer wrote a lipogrammatic text using only words that do not contain the letter "a", very common words such as "and", "a", "that", "are", "was", "as", etc., would have to be absent from the text. (Full disclosure: This idea occurred to me while considering this very possibility for a Middle English text.) If the Voynich ms text is indeed lipogrammatic in this way, then we would have to consider not only the effect of the lack of a particular letter or letters on statistical properties of the text, but also the effect on the grammatical structure imposed by the necessity of avoiding, for example, such normally essential function words as "and", "a", "are", "was", etc., throughout an entire text.
Geoffrey C.
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| geoffreycaveney's Middle English theory |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 10-04-2021, 07:01 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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[Edit KG: I changed the title of this thread so Geoffrey can discuss his Middle English theory here]
Recently in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. threads, I have tentatively raised the idea of a Germanic interpretation of certain possible readings of the Voynich manuscript text. To be clear, I certainly do not mean that the Voynich ms text could represent standard German, Dutch, etc., even in their late medieval forms as Middle High German, Middle Dutch, etc. In fact, in my tentative hypothesis I have made reference to an extremely divergent dialect, Wymysorys, strongly influenced by Polish in the area of southern Poland where it is spoken, and moreover exhibiting a curious mixture of High / Central German (like Standard German), Istvaeonic (Dutch / Flemish), and Low German (Saxon) features that even make it difficult to classify within the branches of the West Germanic languages.
But in this thread I want to focus not on the arguments in favor of this latest idea of mine, but rather on its weakest and most problematic points. Among a number of these, I want to begin with the matter of word-final sounds, letters, and characters or units. This is a huge issue for any theory about the interpretation of the Voynich ms text: The number of distinct final units of Voynich vords, however they may be parsed and classified, is strikingly small and limited. The vast majority of Voynich vords end in EVA [y], [n], [l], or [r], with a significant but much smaller number of them ending in EVA [s], [m], [o], or [d]. EVA [n] is virtually exclusively vord-final.
To justify a correspondence of such a distribution of vord-final units with any reasonably possible known language, I must attribute to EVA [y] a special nature, either as a "null character/unit", or at most as an ambiguous laryngeal "H", which may variously reflect an /h/ sound, a lenition or fricativization of the adjacent sound (as in Irish), possibly a vowel sound in certain environments, and/or possibly still a null unit. This analysis allows, for example, the vord-final sequence EVA [-ky] to possibly represent the unit [k] as the actual final unit, possibly modified in some way by the [y] unit, or possibly not modified at all if [y] is a pure null.
In this way, one can develop a system with [l] and [r] as consonants that occur very frequently in word-final position, and reasonably frequently elsewhere (more so for [l] than for [r]). The special nature of [y] allows a possible modest frequency of word-final occurrence for other consonants, but not a great frequency.
So the question then becomes, which is the consonant EVA [l] that is frequent in both final and non-final position, which is the consonant EVA [r] that is frequent in final position and modestly frequent elsewhere, and how does one account for the positional occurrence of all the other consonants?
In the Germanic interpretation, I propose that EVA [l] is "s", frequent in both final and non-final position, and that EVA [r] is indeed simply "r", frequent in final position (syllable-final as well as word-final) and only modestly frequent in other positions. This seems reasonable for Germanic languages.
But the problematic issue, then, is how to account for all of the other occurrences of word-final consonants? In particular, how does one account for and represent word-final "n" and "t"?
The only explanation I can think of is that EVA [ky], for example, represents "tH", and EVA [qoky], for example, represents "nH", and in these sequences "H" is merely a null unit. However, even this solution only provides for about 600 words with final "t" (or possibly "d") in the entire Voynich ms text, and only less than 200 words with final "n".
Clearly there is no way that a Standard German text of tens of thousands of words will only have less than 200 words with final "n". Only 600 words with final "t" is a less extreme restriction, but still requires careful justification and explanation. These are the most problematic points, prima facie, for any Germanic theory of the Voynich ms text.
Now it does so happen that Standard German is rather extreme among Germanic languages for its very high frequency of final "n". Dutch / Flemish, Saxon, and even other High German dialects drop the final "n" in many places where Standard German retains it. Thus, a divergent dialect such as Wymysorys, an East Central High German dialect with an unusually significant presence of Flemish and/or Saxon features, is at least a much better candidate to be the underlying language of the ms than standard German itself.
In short, any theory that the language of the Voynich ms text is Germanic will first of all have to account for the representation and frequency of all word-final consonants, in particular "s", "r", "n", and "t", and also explain how they are represented in non-final position and with what frequency.
Geoffrey
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| interesting new ideas about f17v |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 08-04-2021, 05:49 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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This is just a brief note to alert readers of the forum to the very interesting new ideas about folio page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that Koen has recently posted on his blog at the following link: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Koen's post mainly concerns the imagery of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , but his interesting new insights inspired me to take a fresh look at the text of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as well. My comments on this topic can be found at the following links on the same site and page:
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I encouraged interested readers to check out all of these new ideas and see what you think.
Geoffrey
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| Domus Aurea |
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Posted by: Ruby Novacna - 28-03-2021, 06:21 PM - Forum: Imagery
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Hello everybody !
I came across a youtibe video in Russian that tries to explain the rosettes page like the map of ancient Rome, including Nero's Domus aurea.
Has such a proposal already been discussed on the forum?
I add the link You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (double the speed!)
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| Regaining the lost order |
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Posted by: Anton - 28-03-2021, 12:05 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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The VMS text is enigmatic on many levels - on the character level, on the word level, on the line level, and even on the alphabet level as well. Dealing with the word and line levels, one notices several features that are simply too well-manifested to be neglected:
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Shifting to the folio and paragraph levels, there have been some You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the attempts to detect the structure of narration in the VMS text.
The latter point suggests that the plain text, beside being encrypted on the character or/and word level, also underwent some kind of shuffling on the word level - and this has been my idea since I finished that blog post of mine. This point is made stronger if the former three bullets are cumulatively taken into account. In fact, shuffling would explain them all right away.
Vord shuffling would also explain why the text is so difficult for us to decode: to approach vord meanings, one would strongly prefer correct vord order, and, on the other hand, it is difficult to approach correct vord order without any idea of the individual vords' meaning. Much like the chicken-and-egg problem, you see.
Now, what could have been this shuffling? Let's say we are pretty sure that it could not have been as simple (or as complex - for the medieval mind) as pure random shuffling of all vords in a folio. That's because that would have been a one-way process, and the output text would have been made virtually impossible for the reader to decode. Unless - and here is the first option that I can suggest right away - shuffling is run against very short vord chunks of constant length. Suppose you break the whole text into three- or four-word chunks, and then shuffle words randomly within those chunks. Then the plain text order would be fairly simple to reconstruct for anyone who has the idea of the grammar of the language of the plain text. Note that, in principle, the chunks do not have to be line-based. In other words, suppose e.g. that we have a three-line source text, the first three-word chunk can be comprised of the first words of the three lines, the second chunk then would be comprised of the second words of the three lines, and so forth. The shuffling is thus vertical instead of lateral. In principle, this is compatible with examples shown in the multipass thread where it appears as if first vords of lines in a paragraph were written in a single pass, and general sequence of writing was not left-to-right, top-to-bottom, but rather top-to-bottom, left-to-right - at least in part.
The second option that I can imagine is technically also shuffling from the perspective of the observed result, but from the perspective of the algorithm I would rather call it "loading". Suppose that one has the available portion of folio space (it may be as simple as a rectangle box or it may be more complex as the folio space limited by images and other portions of the text), and then he proceeds with loading that space with vords, placing vords into certain (possibly even voluntary) positions of that space. What would be the mechanisms that would allow the reader to reconsruct the original vord order? I can think of some, as follows.
a) A static pre-determined map of where exactly you should place each word of plain text. Possibly not the most probable option, since consistent regularity would probably have been discovered by researchers quite quickly.
b) A deterministic algorithm of dynamic word placing. Think of the knight's move for example. Possibly not very probable as well, since that would not explain the right-alignment feature mentioned above, unless there are some specific alignment adjustments in the algorithm.
c) The dedicated pointer. This is like option a), but the presence of dedicated pointer allows you to implement different order for each new case. The dedicated pointer is some sequence or pattern in the text which specifies where each word is located.
d) Positional markers. This is actually an extended variant of option b), only this time the algorithm is supported by positional markers in the text. The abundance of gallows which visually look like markers indeed, and also the baseline jumps of the leading o (and sometimes y) characters, vaguely hint at this possibility.
e) Each vord has a pointer in itself as to where the next vord is located. The leading or the traling character may serve as such pointer, or the gallows character may, as well. Note that the character serving as a pointer does not necessarily mean that it does not contribute to the semantics of the vord. The pointer function may just be an additional function of certain characters - or of characters occupying certain position in a vord.
f) The gallows coverage may also contribute to the vord order in some way.
So... if there is the lost order, then why not go and recover it? 
What I'm pretty sure of, is that approaching the VMS text as the simple left-to-right, top-to-bottom word flow is a dead-end.
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| It doesn't *look* like a galero. |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 22-03-2021, 12:25 AM - Forum: Imagery
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In response to a recent 'question' about the appearance of certain ecclesiastical hats.
We can start with some information here in a separate section: Ecclesiastical hat
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It specifically says: "The depiction of the galero in arms can vary greatly depending on the artist's style. The top of the hat may be shown flat or round. Sometimes the brim is shown much narrower; with a domed top it can look like a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with tassels, but in heraldry it is still called a galero."
Given that the VMs is known to have added a touch of ambiguity, it is difficulty to see how the hats in the VMs White Aries illustration can be held to an even higher standard than the heraldic traditions of the Catholic church. That standard, from the quote above, is pretty ambiguous in itself.
Given these factors of ambiguity, absolute identification of particular objects in the VMs is difficult. What strengthens and promotes identification then is when different items have proposed identifications that can mutually support each other.
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| Linebreaks and line alignment |
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Posted by: Anton - 20-03-2021, 11:12 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I was thinking about line alignment - in particular of the cases where lines are interrupted by images, and how vords are very neatly fit against those images, with no large gaps. In other words, the length of the vord immediately preceding the interruption often, if not always, turns to be exact fit for the available space.
In my opinion this is remarkable, but at the moment I cannot make anything of this.
Another simple observation shows that linebreaks as observed in the VMS have emerged in the process of writing the VMS - in other words, they have not been replicated from elsewhere. Let me explain this in more detail.
Where there are no images, the length of the lines in a given folio is pretty uniform - which is perhaps common for contemporary manuscripts - scribes managed to maintain the length without hyphenation (with hyphenation, of course, that's just trivial). In languages with shorter words (on average), such as Middle High German, that is easier to fulfill, and when words are, on average, longer - such as in Latin, the increasing complexity of maintaining the length of the line can be managed with abbreviation. Anyway, for now it's just sufficient to note that the VMS generally maintains the "width alignment" with the accuracy of a couple of characters - which is less than the average vord length.
Now, consider, for example, f8r, line 2.
![[Image: image.jpg?ref=f8r&q=f8r-130-490.8000030517578-1040-402]](https://voynich.ninja/extractor/image.jpg?ref=f8r&q=f8r-130-490.8000030517578-1040-402)
After sho the line is interrupted by the image. Suppose the lines have been transferred to the VMS from some original text with linebreaks preserved. In that case, the two original lines being initially of the same length, they would have been of the same length in the VMS as well, were the second line not interrupted by the image. But insofar the second line is interrupted by the image, the second line would have been longer than the first one, because it now must include the additional space occupied by the portion of the image. However, this is not the case. The second line is right-aligned with the first line.
Consequently, if one supposes that the VMS text is text copied from elsewhere, then the line breaks as we now see them are not the same (or, let's say, are not necessarily the same) as in that hypothetical original sample.
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