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| Transcription problem - f68v3 and Rosettes foldout |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 02-01-2020, 06:30 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (99)
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At the centre of f68v3 there is a T/O map. In the top right corner of the Rosettes foldout page there is a T/O map.
From my experience all or almost all T/O maps from that period represent the 3 continents Africa, Europe and Asia, with Asia represented as a half circle and the other two continents as quarters.
Sometimes there are other locations highlighted with the T/O map, sometimes not, sometimes just a list of other locations.
So on the rosettes folio I think EVA-asal is "asia".
I have been looking at the text in the top right quarter of the T/O map on f68v3 and the equivalent text in the bottom left quarter of the T/O map on the rosettes folio. This is the text that would correspond to "Europa". The text on the rosettes folio looks to me like an abbreviated version of the text on f68v3. However determining visually whether this is correct is very hard. So I would welcome opinions on this and arguments as to how can determine this.
I think we have in this case what Nick Pelling would term a block paradigm, albeit a small one. However this would be both an internal and external block paradigm.
Also, when I search on voynichese.com there are no examples of words starting EVA-opee so I wonder if this is due to transcription errors or whether words starting this way are very rare.
To me this indicates that we would really benefit from even higher resolution scans.
(I think the list in the half circle on f68v3 is likely to be a list of locations in asia.)
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| Is the VM an autograph or copy? |
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Posted by: Stephen Carlson - 20-12-2019, 01:41 AM - Forum: Provenance & history
- Replies (63)
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I can't seem to find a thread devoted to this topic, though it has been briefly broached recently, but here it is: Is the VM an autograph or a copy?
By "autograph" I mean that the VM embodied the first, finished instantiation of a literary work (or whatever it is). (It is of course possible that it was composed on some scratch medium and transferred to the codex.) By "copy" I mean that some earlier MS instantiates the work and what we have is a scribal copy of it.
I'm curious what evidence exists for determining whether it's an autograph or a copy?
Brainstorming, I would suggest that possible evidence for it being a autograph / against it being a copy are:
- No known exemplar of the work
- No known exemplar(s) of the drawings
- No known exemplar of the text
- No known exemplar of the script
- Various page-layout (formatting) effects at end of lines, at beginning of lines, at first lines of "paragraphs," similar "words" in the vertical direction, more? (These suggest that the text was made to fit the medium.)
Possible evidence against autograph / for copy:
- Scribal corrections
- Script / vord-structure seems well planned and sophisticated
Am I missing anything, beside an ability to play devil's advocate?
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| Creating a Voynichese lexicon and looking for inflection |
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Posted by: RenegadeHealer - 16-12-2019, 08:53 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (2)
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I give credit to davidsch, on his blog, for inspiring this idea. For all I know it's already been done, or at least attempted. If so, I'd be interested to peruse the finished product and hear how it went. If not, I'm considering making this my next little side project. Any feedback would be appreciated.
The size of the VMS's vocabulary isn't all that large. There are only 1,109 types with four or more tokens (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). I had an idea recently that it might be helpful to create a Voynichese lexicon, which lists all vord types which occur in the VMS, in [some sort of] alphabetical order. Obviously we don't have the meanings for any of them. But there are other potentially helpful pieces of data that could be given for each entry, for example:
- Total number of tokens
- Overall rank order based on total number of tokens. I'd use bolding and/or asterisks and/or larger font size for the 350 most common vords, so that they are easy to index, and stand out at page-level view.
- Token breakdown by Currier A pages and Currier B pages, and the frequency differential of tokens in A versus B.
- Token breakdown by apparent subject section (Herbal A, balneological, etc.)
- Token breakdown by line position (line-start, midline, just before drawing, just after drawing, line-end, or label)
- Vords significantly more likely to occur in a line containing this vord than a line without it, broken down by Currier A vs. B
- Rate of reduplication
I'm sure there are many more potentially helpful metrics that could be entered for each entry that I haven't thought of.
One way such a lexicon might be useful is to look for evidence of inflection. If Voynichese is any sort of symbolic language, it's very possible that vords expressing similar meanings are written similarly, and make use of affixation (suffixes, prefixes, and/or infixes) to show subtle but significant differences in the meaning of the vord, its grammatical function, or its relationship to other vords in the line. This is a reasonable idea because it's highly likely that the author spoke at least one agglutinative language which inflects words to nuance their meanings and function.
It might be interesting to list together all the types that appear to have a similar stem, but different endings, along with the metrics for each apparent variation. I wonder if high-level patterns in token occurrence could be found, which would lend support to the idea that, for example EVA [otolar] and [otolaiin] are inflected forms of [otol]. Then, can anything be generalized about the situations where [otol] becomes [otolar]? This could at least establish that [otol], [otolar], and [otolaiin] are meaningfully connected, and give us more clues not only to the meaning of [otol], but also of [-ar] and [-aiin] on the ends of other vords.
I wouldn't be surprised if this approach showed a large number of the VMS's many one-token types (hapax legomena) to be inflected or compounded forms of much more common types.
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| Saz leaves |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 14-12-2019, 11:17 PM - Forum: Imagery
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This is a topic apparently not in this forum previously.
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Question: Are there examples in the VMs plants that would correspond if the leaves were painted blue?
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| Oresme plus Shirakatsi |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 14-12-2019, 11:04 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (15)
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Oresme + Shirakatsi = VMs cosmos
Back in 2014 the comparison of the central part of the VMs cosmos (f68v) with the 'Oresme' image, BNF Fr. 565 fol. 23, by E. Velinska was a major discovery for VMs investigation. The significant discrepancy between the two representations was the outer wheel and curved spokes of the VMs illustration.
Earlier this year, Linda (I believe) was the first to post to this forum an image of a diagram relating to the Eight Phases of the Moon, based on the work of Anania of Shirak / Anania Shirakatsi, that has a very similar structure of a wheel with eight curved spokes.
It seems reasonable to suggest that a combination of these two illustrations will produce a cosmic representation that has all the structural parts found in the VMs cosmos.
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| Different behaviours in line-final words...? |
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Posted by: nickpelling - 14-12-2019, 11:48 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (30)
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Hi everyone,
It's now becoming much better known that certain glyph sequences are far more common in either Currier A or Currier B, which is good. But I was wondering today: if certain glyph sequences are so much rarer in A or B than in the other, why do they occur in the other at all? Surely if they were (let's say) 'prohibited' by some implicit rule, we shouldn't see any instances of them at all?
And so I started looking at occurrences of popular glyph patterns in the Currier language where they were less popular. My first target was EVA chd (pink) and EVA shd (cyan), not in B (where they are most popular) but in A (where they are far rarer). Here's a voynichese.com query for this:
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What was immediately apparent to me from this was that in Herbal A pages, EVA chd/shd occur most often either in the last word of a line, or in the last word immediately before the text is interrupted by a drawing, e.g.:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f9r You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f15r (twice) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f24r You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (four times) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f30r You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f47r (twice) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f56r You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (twice) f93v
I believe that this sits far beyond the realms of simple probability, and I suspect that what we are seeing here is visual evidence for some kind of systematic contraction in A pages in places on the page where the desired text is larger than the space available for writing. I suspect there may well be many more (and not just EVA -m words).
Has anyone done any tests on letter sequence properties specifically on words that are either line-final or are just before an interrupting drawing?
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| Palindromes |
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Posted by: davidjackson - 10-12-2019, 10:44 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (7)
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I was recently thinking about Palindromes (words that read the same backwards and forwards).
All European languages (that I know of) have single word palindromes, but this effect seems to be almost absent in the VM.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are simple three letter words.
The only longer palindromes seem to be unique in all cases with the exception of occo, which appears three times in the manuscript.
Here are the ones I've spotted (quite possible I've missed some, this was only a quick count)
dydyd (f1)
seees (f3)
oeeo (f6v, f72v2, f101v2)
ykaky (f55v)
yekey (f69v)
ylaly (f73v)
lolol (f72v)
shchs (f113r)
The low number of palindromes is of course to be expected, due to the position awareness of glyphs.
It's possible that such palindromes are actually the result of misspellings, and this could give us some concrete examples of such scribal errors within the corpus, allowing us to correct scribal errors and reduce erroneous words from the transcription.
For example, taken at random because it made me laugh out loud, lolol: lo appears 15 times by itself, 182 as a word initial and ol 3052 times as a word final and 538 times as a word by itself. But lo*ol only gives two results, lolol and lolkeol. This second word is more likely to be two words run together, as both lol and keol are common words. This suggests to me that lo and ol have well defined functions, but shouldn't be used together; the scribe made a mistake with lolol, and missed out a space in lolkeol. What mistake in lolol? Well, the prior word is checkho, which is unique. If we move the first l over, then we get checkhol, which appears twice in the corpus. We now have checkhol appearing three times, followed by olol, which appears 18 times in the corpus.
So we have now removed three unique words from the corpus in a logical manner!
No idea if we can do this with the rest of them, it's getting late and I'm tired now. Has anyone any research into this angle, or into reducing the number of unique words by seeing if they can be exploded and reassembled with adjoining words?
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