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I am not convinced by the...
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Voynich's anatomy
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EVA "qo" in 15th century ...
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[Article] What We Actuall...
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Palatino 766 pipes, pools...
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No text, but a visual cod...
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[split] Aga Tentakulus' L...
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Glyph counts between Gallows |
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Posted by: julian - 30-07-2021, 06:16 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (31)
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I looked at the count of glyphs that appear between the gallows glyphs, benched and un-benched, on all lines of the text, and ignoring spaces between words.
One goal was to see whether the counts supported the idea that the benched gallows are just another way of writing their un-benched versions: the evidence I found doesn't strongly support that.
Another goal was to see whether there are differences in the distributions of number of glyphs following EVA p, k, f and t. It turns out that statistically there is a difference: EVA t , k tend to be followed by 5 glyphs before the next gallows is written, and EVA f, p tend to be followed by 6 or 7 glyphs. For the benched gallows, the statistics are poorer and less compelling.
Is this difference between counts for EVA t, k and EVA f, p somehow related to the extra flourish that EVA f, p have - I call it the "curlicrossbar" (what is the correct terminology?)?
Another feature that is revealed is the perhaps well known paucity of occurrences of two gallows next to one another.
Here's the post about it: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Your thoughts on this and suggestions for further investigations along these lines would be most welcome!
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| The "qo" |
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Posted by: Anton - 27-07-2021, 10:10 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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The recent exchange in the pinned thread of "A brief summary..." where it's stated that no label uses the "qo-" prefix (which is not true in fact) led me (via the Rene's website) to the fact that the root in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is labeled with "qo" inside of it.
I checked, and this does not seem to be a prefix, rather a standalone vord "qo". The "qo" is a valid vord with 29 occurrences beside f99v, as early as in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and as late as in f116r. Sometimes it has an "apostrophe" (I always forget what's the appropriate English word for that, is it "macron"?), in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it has a ligature. It is not clear whether all three versions bear the same meaning. Quite often (seven times) "qo" is the first vord in the line.
Why would the inside of a root be labeled "qo" (read: why would a root be labeled inside at all)? Is that a colour annotation or some other remark? Can this give us any clue?
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| Exploited savant hypothesis |
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Posted by: byatan - 27-07-2021, 12:04 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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While describing how the large number of rules the text obeys should preclude, in the event of a hoax or gibberish text, a generation without external aids, I had to stop for a second, because usually human brains decide on "can't" before physics actually forces it.
In the event that the text is (at least mostly) meaningless, could it still have been generated without (or mostly without) external aids, in spite of being incredibly regular?
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With these capabilities in mind, it doesn't seem of the question that a human brain could do something on the order of complexity of generating the ms text.
Savants have been mentioned before, but as far as I'm aware this is always in the context of the savant directing (for whatever reasons) his execution of the work. I think this is very unlikely because the kind of abilities like this tend (as far as I'm aware) to exist in people with very low general intelligence. Such a person would likely be directed by others, if at all.
Although Steve Wozniak is not exactly a savant, he is an example of someone with incredible powers whom another human used as a tool to accomplish their own goals. And maybe you are using the product of that venture to access this forum. It is not hard (other things equal) to imagine an enterprising person in the early 1400s who knew a savant who has an ability to produce real-looking nonsense text. This would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create (for whatever purpose) a work of art that other humans would go nuts not understanding.
First point against this hypothesis is that it might be a stretch to imagine a savant who has the circumstances where he is able to access writing materials and show / develop this talent, and then meet the right person to take it to the next level.
Second point is that it's hard to imagine such an oddly idiosyncratic rulebase coming out someone's intuition, although that should be a predictable consequence of savants having very different capabilities and possibly architecture.
Third point is the odd illustrations are still hard to explain. *edit* Actually, I no longer think this is the case, because anyone capable of organizing the creation of this thing would predictably want weird drawings and that should be within the capabilities of some available artists.
Fourth point, separate hands. But, maybe the savant dictated, maybe his writing was absolute crap and others actually copied it to the ms, etc.
I'm not sure how anyone would ever prove this without additional historical information coming to light, but a very good start would be to find present-day humans who can intuitively generate large amounts of valid looking (or at least intriguing) but completely nonsense text. Luigi Serafini comes to mind, but as far as I'm aware he's neither a savant nor of low intelligence. I also don't know anything about the properties of the text and it's not clear from what I can find whether or to what degree it was actually generated intuitively. But, as far as I know, the CS text is only superficially similar to the VMS text in the sense that they are both unintelligible and does not have anywhere near the same regularity.
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| Time to retire Currier languages? |
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Posted by: Emma May Smith - 26-07-2021, 06:28 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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The concept of Currier languages - that the statistics of the text vary in different parts of the manuscript - has been very useful for research. It has allowed us to compare the text with itself and understand more about the structure and variety of words.
But for several years it has been apparent that the difference between Currier A and B were not binary but a spectrum, with features growing or diminishing in strength across the manuscript. The two Currier languages only represent broad categories which themselves contain diversity.
We've always been able to analyse the text of the manuscript in sections, but the more recent work by Lisa Fagin Davis on scribal hands provides another way to divide the text. (Acknowledgement that, like for many things Currier was here first. But the recent work is much more secure than Currier's.)
Given this, is it time for researchers to retire speaking about Currier languages and instead talk exclusively - or mostly - about Scribes?
Is there any benefit from continuing with the distinction of Currier languages?
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| Spaces and word cases |
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Posted by: Barbrey - 26-07-2021, 02:17 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Hi all, a quick, maybe stupid, remark re the spaces. I've run into a few quotes in my research talking about spaces or space in the world, but the medieval philisophers say not to think of it as empty because it is always filled with aether or air. And I've seen a few small symbols in the images where elements occur that have a iii___iii___iii pattern. Air appears to be characterized by blank white space, not a 4th mark.
I noticed because of the aiii sequences, but also mention this because there seems to be a distinct lack of variety in Voychinese word endings so cases cannot possibly be included. But I consider the author quite tricky and Latin if it's Latin has quite a few words for air. One of them is aeris. It occurred to me if you threw those letters into the spaces you could account for the majority of case endings. 9 might just mean pick your poison.
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| Symbols, 40, Quintessence and Friedman's "a priori" hypothesis |
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Posted by: Barbrey - 25-07-2021, 11:19 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Hi all, I'm hoping our cryptologists and linguists can help me out. One of the reasons I've worked hard on rosettes page symbolism is I've believed the text symbols might actually operate as symbols when in certain positions, particularly at the start of "vords". If, as Friedman says in his final conclusion, this could be an attempt to construct an " a priori" lexicon or language, then it seemed to me that the writer might make use of his/her personal hieroglyphs in constructing the script, and/or that the way original alphabets stemmed from actual objects - A from Aleph or Ox, for instance - might play a role.
I've got a fairly cohesive schemata of the Rosettes page now, with labels for its constituent parts, based on Aristotelian natural philisophy and Christianity, and moreover a kind of "index" for the VMS as a whole.
I think it's a sound diagram and I am struggling to put it into a paper that explains it properly.
But I don't know if my glyph matching is true, nor whether it would make a difference to entropy, or how it might work in expansion with actual letters/numbers to create true words. I feel I'm onto something but that could yet again be a chimera. And I don't want to even hypothesize it at the end of my paper as a possible avenue for script/language decryption if it would not even work.
Part of my analysis includes the balneological section as primarily concerned with the distillation of quintessence. I arrived at this independently, but discovered this was Brumbaugh's opinion in the 70's too, though he doesn't explain how he came to this conclusion.
So that was a long preamble for this: on the rosettes there is a symbol (low bottom left outside the main core, looks like a clock) that, if turned, is a v-shape, and included in one of Valentinius's alchemical charts as "aqua vitae". I don't have earlier provenance on it but it could have been around. It is inside a circle, and aether/aqua vitae was considered to move in a circle unlike the other four elements. I have some support from other symbols and nimbi to support this hypothesis, but won't go into here.
Now aqua vitae/aether is also identical to quintessence, which also has an an alchemical sign. QE.
Quintessence means the fifth element.
My rosettes schemata matches " o" to Spiritus or some variation of Primus, and the 4 symbol - the upright one (I think eva "L"?) - to Mineralis or Elementa. And of course, it was a form of 4 in earlier days.
So a 4 connected by ligature to a 1 could quite easily be symbolized by 40 in our author's script and mean the fifth element, or quintessence, the " spiritual" element, goal of alchemy. And I think I read somewhere this symbol 40 most often appears in the balneological section, where I contend distilling it as pure alcohol from wine (a la Rupescissa 1360's, and it subsequently becomes the basis for chemistry and most medicines) - is a major theme.
It all rather handily works out, in theme, in number, with my schemata, with everything really, though I try to keep my mind open. Brumbaugh's mistake was, in my opinion, jumping to text analysis too soon when he had a lot to offer on the images, particularly the Aristotelian and neo-Platonic concepts
So, hypothetically, if 40 stands for quintessence, how might that work with the rest of the letters following it? I guess 40 might always stand for the whole word and the letters following describe or are connected to it. But as a concept, it might just sub in for the kw sound, like a for aleph (ox) did, or perhaps some kind of scribal syllable thing to do with root words, so sub for "quin" maybe? And its positioning at start of word might mean that's where most of the glyphs, when operating as symbols, might appear? Don't know.
My question to you is how, as a symbol in the text, it might work best to solve problems of entropy and line structure? Even if you didn't follow me, or didn't buy in, the answer will help me with all the other glyphs, too, so would really appreciate any answers!
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| VMS author from big data |
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Posted by: byatan - 25-07-2021, 07:29 PM - Forum: Provenance & history
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VMS author(s) (or at least scribe(s)) apparently learned to write some time (many years) before the ms was written. So there is the non zero chance that additional writings from at least one person who created the ms survive.
Additional support for this might be found in the possible application of crypto to the ms writing--it is not hard to imagine that the author could have been employed at some point by the type of organization with big archives.
The creation of the vms was probably extremely expensive for its day, so the author is probably more likely than most to have corresponded privately with the types of bigwigs who might also keep archives.
One point against is the vast amount of written documents from that area presumably lost. Are there any estimates for how many documents (define it as you will) might survived out of all written in 15th century europe? I could not find this on google.
So, what we could envision happening is a mass-digitization and aggregation of basically everything written that still exists from the time period and region most likely encompassing the author's life. Then automatically ML looks for handwriting matches to the vms. This might turn up some information about the author.
I understand very few of the relevant documents are currently digitized. Is this because there is a comparative, if not general lack of interest and funding in this field or are other things involved?
edit: while writing this I had forgotten that the MS was rebound and is missing pages. Additional impacts of a "total old documents digitization" project might be finding these missing pages, or even other totally separate documents with related writing.
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| Correlation between line-initial letter and words on that line? |
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Posted by: nickpelling - 25-07-2021, 04:36 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Has anyone looked for statistical evidence of a correlation between the first word of a line of text and words on that same line?
Plenty of people (myself included in 2006) have wondered whether the first letter on a line of Voynichese might somehow affect or control the words on that line. (For example, I wondered whether it might be a transposition cipher working with one of the gallows.)
Has anyone tried looking for this kind of thing?
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| Is the VMS homogeneous or a composite work? |
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Posted by: bi3mw - 21-07-2021, 12:38 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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It is not clear to me whether the VMS is a work that contains a coherent overall theme from the first to the last page and must therefore be considered homogeneous, or whether it is a matter of self-contained, separate chapters (sections) that were copied from different templates (from different authors). In the latter case the chapters (sections) would have nothing to do with each other. What do you think ?
There are, of course, recurring representations of certain illustrations, e.g. the naked nymphs, across sections, but that could also just be the interpretation of the illustrator of the VMS, suggesting a homogeneity that is not thematically present at all.
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