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problematic points for an...
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Regaining the lost order
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The gallows intrusion, th...
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Linebreaks and line align...
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No text, but a visual cod...
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| The Impossibility of Double Gallows |
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Posted by: Emma May Smith - 16-01-2016, 10:09 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I've been playing around with some bigram tables lately, and though I haven't yet seen anything shockingly new, there is something reassuringly old which keeps pressing me to explain. Namely, that no two gallows characters can appear next to one another in the text. It likely seems as though such an obvious fact needs no explanation, but I feel it does.
By gallows characters I mean [k, t, f, p] and their bench versions [ckh, cth, cfh, cph]. Despite the 8x8 possible combinations for such characters, they basically do not exist in pairs. There are, as far as I can find, six exceptions in the whole text. Not six combinations, but six, individual, once occurring combinations of any two gallows characters.
Why is this important and why does it need explaining? Firstly, it is important because the way characters fit together should belie the linguistic facts underlying the text (assuming the text is linguistic, naturally). Next, because the statistics for gallows combinations are so stark, there being next to none.
Most combinations of characters appear a few times even if they do not normally go together. So [ak], a combination which should not ideally exist, gets about 40 hits; [oq] gets 20; [lm] gets about 10; and [en] 15. At these levels the stats are basically noise. They are likely no more than writing and reading errors, or missplit words. Even if they encode something genuine it cannot be a main part of the underlying language.
Yet, even with the possibility of errors, two gallows characters do not occur next to one another. Why? Well, here's my guess and what it means.
1) The gallows characters are distinct in essential form from all other characters. Many characters begin with a small round or straight stroke (such as what Cham's stroke theory is based on) and can be easily confused: [ei] for [a], [ch] for [ee], [r] for [s], among others. But gallows characters all begin with a long straight stroke above the line which only they use. Although the writer may have mistakenly written one gallows character when he meant another—and a reader likewise—they can only ever be confused for each other and never a non-gallows character.
2) Although gallows often come at the beginning of words they almost never come at the end. Even when a space between two words is ambiguous, the joining of two neighbouring words will not bring together two gallows. The reader cannot misread their way to double gallows.
3) The gallows all take the same place within the structure of a word. One loop or two, one leg or two, bench or no bench, no variation in their shape causes them to take a different place or makes it possible for them to occur together.
4) The structure of words is strict and variations simply don't occur all that often. This is a point made by researchers a long time ago but bears repeating. Characters fall into classes according to their distribution and role within words. They don't move about and do different things (I can only think of one possible exception to this). This is something fundamental to what they represent.
5) All the gallows must thus share some feature which puts them into the same class and makes them work in similar ways.
6) Their similar role and their similar appearance suggests that whomever invented the Voynich script did so with a clear understanding of not only how the underlying language worked, but also how languages in general work. The gallows itself as a character category is also a linguistic category.
7) Further, it is most likely a phonological category, which would explain why two sounds cannot appear together and why they must appear in certain places within words. Given the constraints on possible 'sound sets' within any language, and the number of distinct characters, the gallows as a feature can only represent a handful of phonological features.
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| Currier A and B |
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Posted by: Anton - 16-01-2016, 02:02 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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The original Currier's explanation can be found You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
"Currier A" and "Currier B" "languages" have been distinguished from each other by statistically significant peculiarities in formation of sequences.
Of course, it was made clear from the beginning that Currier A and B are not languages in the common sense of the word, the term "language" is used only formally for brevity. We do not know what is the real underlay mechanism or phenomenon that leads to the differences observed.
The problem is that while A and B are different, they are not totally different. Namely, there are vords that occur both in Currier A and B. In the course of working upon my latest blog post, I made some initial screening on the "Voynich stars" occurrences in the botanical folios with respect to Currier A and B. This was not included in the paper and the examination was far from comprehensive, but off-hand I did not see any strong correlation between star occurrences and Currier language. E.g., "dayside" (f68r1) and "nightside" (f68r2) stars on general may occur both in Currier A and Currier B. A given star may occur both in Currier A and B. E.g. the most frequent star of "otol" occurs mainly in Currier A, but has two occurrences in Currier B (these stats are limited to plant folios only). "otor", if I am not mistaken, happens roughly equally between Currier A and B.
The question is whether there has been any investigation of vords with respect to Currier languages. Which vords do occur only in Currier A or only in Currier B? Which vords occur both in A and B? Do all labels with significant frequency count occur both in A and B? The latter question, as you understand, is aimed at establishing whether labels are Currier-invariant.
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| Nick Pelling addresses the London Fortean Society this Feb 25, 2016 |
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Posted by: david - 12-01-2016, 08:28 PM - Forum: News
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Nick Pelling has announced he will be addressing The Fortean Society on the Voynich this Feb 25 in London. His press release reads:
Quote:I’ve been persuaded by the lovely people at the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to give a talk next month (25th February 2016, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 7.30pm for an 8pm start, £4/£2 concs) on the weird (and occasionally wonderful) Voynich Manuscript.
If you haven’t been to an LFS event before, they start about 8pm with a “Fortmanteau” (a Fortean news round-up), followed by the main speaker for most of an hour. Then, after a 20-minute break, there’s a Q&A, finishing at 10-ish, optionally followed by a drink and a chat at the bar. As normal, I’m expecting to be assailed with questions on just about every cipher mystery going: which should be excellent fun. If any Cipher Mysteries readers plan to come along, please let me know!
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
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| f108v and Statistical Changes in the Text |
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Posted by: Emma May Smith - 10-01-2016, 06:48 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I have been studying the text of the Stars (or Recipes) section for a few months now. One interesting part which I have noticed and not yet managed to explain is the bottom half of page f108v.
There are two things that make this half page interesting:
1) The stars here, unlike elsewhere in the same section, are linked to the beginnings of paragraphs by short lines. The illustrator clearly understood something was different about these paragraphs.
2) The text statistics of these paragraphs are rather different from the rest of the section.
The difference in the text statistics for these paragraphs can be broken down into two features.
The first is simply that no instance of [p] or [f] occur there, when we might expect to see one or more on the first line of each paragraph. The other is that there is only one instance of a gallows letter at the beginning of a line, and that not even the beginning of a paragraph where they often occur.
Given that both these features are usually seen in the text, and that they both occur in the same part of the text (first line of a paragraph), their absence is likely to be linked. It seems that whatever process normally puts these characters in their usual place has been omitted for this short part of the section.
I do not know why the process has been omitted (beyond speculation) but it is important that it 1) can be omitted, and 2) that the writer (or at least illustrator) is aware of the fact. It is suggestive that if the Voynich text can be written without these features then they are not core parts of the underlying language, or simply not linguistic at all.
Sadly there is a gap in the manuscript at this point so we do not know how long this different kind of text goes on for.
Does anybody have any thoughts on this?
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| Swallowtail merlons... or provenance |
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Posted by: david - 09-01-2016, 10:00 AM - Forum: Imagery
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An undeveloped idea, and I only summarise the two arguments here below.
Nick Pelling has suggested that the castle merlons on the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are in the Northern Italian medieval "swallow-tail" style - ie, instead of being in the traditional |-| shape, they're in a V shape.
This has helped to shift the production area for the manuscript away from northern Europe to northern Italy instead.
However, the zodiac influence has once again shifted attention back to northern Europe, in particular the French / German border, based on identification of artistic influences from regional calendar and printing in the Voynich (a brief overview You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
So - leaving aside the question of the humanistic cursive script, which in any case appears to have been used all over Europe - how do we reconcile the contradictions?
Well, it strikes me the swallow-tail identification isn't really 100%. For a start, every merlon on that page is swallow-tail - see this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., or this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Surely the simplest explanation here is that, due to the small size of the script, the scribe simply drew the merlons in this fashion without paying any attention to real architecture. After all, why should he have paid any attention to this real life detail, unless it was something important? Far more likely the author wanted to display the merlons to show he was drawing a castle, and simply drew it in this style without even being aware of the difference.
Which means - we can shift the provenance back to northern Europe again.
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| The "Recipe" section |
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Posted by: Anton - 08-01-2016, 04:34 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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I have no time for a blog post and actually there are no decisive results in there, just an interesting discussion maybe. So let it be a forum post (telegraph style) and serve as a teaser of our forum - along with certain other threads already created.
Following the discussion in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I further thought the problem of sequential repetitions over, and listed two other options, besides them being a natural information flow:
- shuffling of text within the same page
- shuffling of text between different pages
In the second case, to keep it ordered and decipherable, the "missing" vords of a given page should be contained elsewhere, from where they are extracted at the moment of decipherment and filled into the page in question (e.g in between the vords thereof or in some other, more complex, manner), - to make the page thereafter decipherable via some second-layer rule (e.g. transposition).
This option, hypothetically, could explain weird statistical properties of the VMS text as analyzed on the sequential basis.
So where might that elsewhere be? Again, to keep the stuff ordered and decipherable, the author could have placed it into a separate section of the manuscript. Of all sections, the so-called Recipe section has many attractive peculiarities as to this hypothesis.
- It is situated in the very end of the VMS
- In sharp contrast to any other section, it contains absolutely no drawings (except for the star markers, we'll come to that below)
- It is comprised of many small paragraphs, each of which is marked with a star, so as to clearly distinguish it from the others
- It occupies a dedicated quire
All in all, looks like a reference book.
For the reader to not become very excited, let's honestly note one serious counter-argument at once. All Recipe section folios are in Currier B. So the things are definitely not as simple as the scribe writing part of the text in folio xx and part thereof - in the Recipe section; obviously we would have had the Recipe section alternately in Currier A and B in that case.
However, nothing prevents us from considering some observations and stats.
In the first place, each paragraph in the Recipe secton has a star. In some cases, paragraphs seem to have more than one star, like e.g. in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where the third star from the top seems to be associated with the same paragraph that the second star is. However, probably there is just a one-line paragraph associated with this star, and the preceding paragraph (associated with the second star) just has its last line full-length (thus masking out the paragraph break).
That the star markers are not illustrations or simply idle embellishments is best illustrated by f108v, where several stars in the lower half of the page are expressly linked to certain lines. A curious way of linking is observed in f103v, where the sixth star is linked to the line before the fifth star - like if the scribe forgot to put the star in place and returned to this afterwards.
Next, the stars are not all similar. There are unpainted stars (like the eighth star in f103r), and there are dark painted stars (like the first star in f103r). There are also stars only the centre of which is dark-painted (like the first star of f103v). The full dark-painted stars cease to exist already after f108r, so I consider them to be the same as partly dark-painted stars, the latter being pure simplifications. This might or might not be the case, but for the further discussion I consider them the same.
There are also stars the centre of which is light-painted (like the seventh star in f103r). The light character of painting makes them hard to distinguish from the stars unpainted. A question arises whether the light-painted stars are the same as unpainted. The answer to all probability is: NO, because if they were the same, then there would have been no reason to apply light paint at all.
The sequential painting scheme seems to be as follows:
- dark-painted star
- one or more light-painted stars (if any)
- one or more unpainted stars (if any)
There are also stars with an ink dot at the centre. They can be light-painted or unpainted; not all light-painted stars have a centre dot. These observations dismiss the hypothesis that the dot is used as a reminder to paint (or not to paint) a star. Looks like a marker for some other purpose.
Likewise, star tails are probably markers. Pelling once suggested them to represent letter "y" in a hidden fashion, but I don't consider this a plausible explanation. Usually tails look downwards, but there is at least one tail looking upwards (last star in f103r).
Hereinafter I don't account for differences between light-painted and unpainted stars, neither for the dedicated significance (if any) of stars with centre dots or with tails.
To complete this review, there are a couple of "weird" elements - a small (dark-painted) star in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and elision marks leftwards to the star in f107r. Hereinafter, the small star is treated like a regular dark-painted star.
The painting regularity observed above suggests some kind of repeating "cycle". To all appearance, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has ever been the true beginning of quire 20. Since it begins with a dark-painted star, the cycle is marked by dark-painted stars and, as shown above, may contain one or more stars.
I at once suspected that stars might represent paragraphs, with dark-painted stars representing first paragraphs of folios. Of course this hypothesis implies that only pages that have distinct paragraphs (called "formatted pages" hereinafter) are referred to. Pages containing no paragraphs but only labels or circular inscriptions (such as Zodiac folios, for example) do not, according to this hypothesis, require additional information blocks from the Recipe section for their decipherment, and thus may be deciphered in themselves. This may or may not sound plausible, but it is the logical outcome of the hypothesis brought forward.
I then performed some basic stats to validate this hypothesis.
There is an offhand argument against this "paragraph" hypothesis: the overwhelming majority of the cycles are two-star long - which implies two-paragraph pages. However, two-paragraph pages are far not as frequent as opposed to others in the VMS.
Nevertheless, this noted, let's go on and do some counts.
I counted 324 stars in total in 23 Recipe section pages. However, 2 folios (=4 pages) are lost, so we must count for that. The mean star count per folio would be 324/23 = 14,09, so the estimation of the total count in the Recipe section would be 14,09*(23+4) = 380 stars.
How many paragraphs are there in the formatted pages of the VMS (the Recipe section itself being excluded, of course)? I counted 203 pages (some of them actually have paragraphs spreading over two folios, like e.g. f101r, and thus were counted as one page here). Of those, 21 pages are not formatted, leaving us with 203-21=182 formatted pages. There are 433 paragraphs in there. Not everywhere it was easy to count the exact number of paragraphs, so there is some uncertainty expressed as 433 (+7/-11). In other words, the figure is somewhere in between 422 and 440 paragraphs.
12 folios (which presumably equals to 24 pages) have been lost, and we must account for that. In estimation of the actual number of formatted pages, we should mind that not all lost pages are formatted. Two lost Zodiac pages were, most probably, unformatted. All other lost pages are likely to have been formatted. Hence 182 +(24-2) = 204 is our estimation of the total number of formatted pages in the VMS (Recipes excluded). The long-range average, as calculated from the figures above, is [433 (+7/-11)]/182 = 2,319...2,418 paragraphs per formatted page. So the estimation of the total number of paragraphs in the VMS (Recipes excluded) would be (2,319...2,418)*204 = 473...493 paragraphs.
This is much more than the number of stars in the Recipes. So our paragraph hypothesis fails for the second time.
Let's see if cycles (= dark-painted stars) might stand for formatted pages though. I counted 164 dark-painted stars, which, adjusted to the missing Recipes folios, results in 164/23*27= 193 dark-painted stars. 193 as compared to 204 is a 5,4% difference. From the engineering/statistical viewpoint - not too big to dismiss the assumption immediately, but, I'd say, not too small to adopt it without reservation.
***
So:
- Stars in the Recipe section do NOT stand for paragraphs elsewhere in the VMS.
- The estimated number of cycles (dark-painted stars) in the Recipe section is quite close to the estimated number of formatted pages in the rest of the VMS.
- Only dark-painted versus all others cyclic pattern has been considered. One needs to investigate whether tails or centre dots exhibit any cyclic behaviour.
- The fact that the entire Recipe section is in Currier B is a serious counter-argument to the developed discourse.
One thing that I don't think very likely is that the Recipe section has anything to do with recipes or that sort of stuff. The absence of illustrations (which is a sharp contrast to the main body of the VMS) and the complex (at least three-layer: paints, dots and tails) marker appearance of the stars suggest some sort of a reference-list.
If one could find some cyclic pattern other than paragraphs in the VMS formatted pages, and that with the predominance of the cycle period of two, - that would be a truly interesting development of this discussion.
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| First official copy of the Voynich has been commissioned |
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Posted by: david - 05-01-2016, 12:28 PM - Forum: News
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It seems the Beinecke has authorised the specialist manuscript producers "Siloé" from Spain to make the first ever authorised copy of the Voynich.
The project will start in February, when the specialists of the company will be given access for a whole week to make their own photos of the book and get "the feel" for it.
They will then start producing handdrawn exact copies on vellum for sale.
Siloé is one of the worlds premier manuscript makers, and has made 34 official copies of ancient manuscripts in the last two decades, 14 of which have won international awards. They've been pestering Yale for the last decade to allow them access to the Voynich.
It seems Yale opened a selection process last year, and has this week confirmed Siloé has won it.
23 professionals will be working on the process, and the reproduction will be "100% identical" promises the firms director.
However, the first copy is not expected to be released until 2018.
No news on how much the copies will sell for - some of Siloé's works sell for over €10,000. I understand the project is being financed by crowdfunding.
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