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| The gallows intrusion, the baseline jumps and multipass |
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Posted by: Anton - 03-05-2020, 12:03 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (73)
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I'm quite excited at the examples provided by Rene in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Quote:In my transliteration I have three annotations related to gallows intruding in the line above. There may be more of course. They are here:
f78v, sixth line of the second paragraph: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
f95v2 line 4: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the Beinecke scan is better here)
f95v1, paragraph 2 line 2: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
There is another marginal case in the middle of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where 'something happened': You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
As Rene points out, such cases may be hinting that certain lines were written before others.
The gallows with their loops reaching upwards are good flags to inspect such behavior. Let's call it the "gallows intrusion" for brevity, meaning that the top of the gallows "intrudes" the above line, forcing part thereof to draw apart or to move slghtly upwards in order to avoid interfering with the intruding gallows.
I noted that in all Rene's examples the intruding gallows is in the odd line of the paragraph, while the line suffering from the intrusion is the even line. Which suggests that lines may have been written in alternating order, first odd ones, then even ones.
For the first screening attempt I checked f1r. I placed line numbers for convenience. I found four occurrences of gallows intrusion here, marked with blue ellipses. In the first and fourth occurrences, the whole vord suddenly jumps notably higher (as compared to the preceding vord). In the second and third occurrences, part of the vord (starting, in both cases, with a gallows) jumps higher as compared to the preceding character of the same vord (in both cases it's the glyph o). In all cases the intruding gallows are in odd lines.
There are other occurrences of "jumps", both in even and odd lines, which are not associated with any "intrusions" from the below lines. This suggests that "jumps" may be just a regular habit of the scribe, or/and that they are caused by some other effect, not the effect of alternating the lines in writing.
Of course, more folios need to be examined for this behavior. What do you think? Do I see just what I want to see?
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| The curious case of a botched Greek to Latin transcription ("Twaetihaoyc") |
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Posted by: Hallfiry - 01-05-2020, 11:05 AM - Forum: Codicology and Paleography
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Back in 1839 or 1840 Jacob Grimm was visited by a man who brought him a transcription of a document from 1120. The Document contained a few unclear words, in particular "Twaetihaoyc". Grimm couldn't decipher it and set it aside. A few years later he came across a print of a better transcription of the original document and found the word was actually the name ΓΩΔΕΦΡΗΔΟΥϹ, Godefredus, and somebody originally transcribed it, who didn't know Greek and thus matched it to the most similar looking Latin letter.
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| How to recombine glyphs to increase character entropy? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 28-04-2020, 08:59 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (73)
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As you may or may not know, the character entropy of Voynichese is extremely low. This is caused by a number of phenomena, not in the least by the fact that characters appear in predictable places. For example in EVA if you have [i], it is likely followed by [i] or [n] and preceded by [i] or [a].
Rene posted the following in Marco's thread today:
Quote:- how to recombine glyphs in order to increase entropy? I did some very initial experiments with this that were quite promising, but the number of possible permutations is a big problem here.
This is something I have been exploring as well last year:
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An intuitive example is the following: [aiin] is a unit so common in EVA, where it is written as a series of characters. This might unnecessarily inflate character entropy, so what if we replace [aiin] by a single character?
(Note: I take a humble stance when it comes to statistics and will be happily corrected by those more skilled in the subject.)
What I learned was the following:
- I preferred to use the value h2/h1 because this gives the text's realized h2 as a percentage of its highest possible h2. So very much simplified a text with for example (h2/h1=0.5) reaches 50% of its maximal h2. You cannot compare h2 outright because h1 has to be taken into account as well (at least, this is what I took from Anton's teachings, and it seemed to work out in practice as well).
- My strategy was basically to introduce new characters to replace common letter groups. This did raise h2, but h1 as well since I was inflating the alphabet
- Cumulative changes interact in an unpredictable way. The first couple of changes you make might actually reinforce each other, with all changes combined resulting in a greater h2/h1 increase than the sum of their separate effects. After a while, however, the inflated alphabet takes its toll and I was unable to further raise h2/h1. So in the beginning you might get great results but after a few changes there are already diminishing returns, until you reach a critical point where little to no increase is possible.
These were my findings about replacing glyph groups by new characters:
- Replacing [qo] by something else has little effect. I think this is because the new character is still extremely positionally dependent (it always follows space).
- I was unable to do anything useful with [ee] either.
- Replacing clusters like [aiin], [aiir]... has the highest effect I've found. I-clusters in vanilla EVA transcriptions are a huge burden on character entropy.
- Collapsing benches into one new character each has a great effect. Collapsing benched gallows does not, but combined with collapsing normal benches, the effect is great.
- Collapsing the bigrams [ar, or, al, ol, am] (one of Nick's suggestions) has a decent effect as well.
![[Image: naamloos-1-kopic3abren-1.gif]](https://herculeaf.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/naamloos-1-kopic3abren-1.gif)
Combining the three most effective measures, I was able to raise h2/h1 to a barely acceptable level. However, h2 alone was still much too low.
Removing spaces has an extremely beneficial effect, but I felt uncertain about how "legal" this step was. It is a change of a different order than combining some of EVA's strokes.
Since writing this post I have not had any better ideas... So Rene I wonder what your own experience is and if other members might have ideas.
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| Info request: Paris, Burgundy, Flanders |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 28-04-2020, 05:57 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (11)
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Many comparisons have been made between VMs imagery and various historical illustrations. And each of the historical images has its own historical provenance, to one degree or another.
This request for examples is centered on a period of time between 1400 and 1450, but open on either end. It is located to Paris, the Duchy of Burgundy, which included Flanders, Brabant and other places including Luxembourg. However, French history cannot be ignored.
Examples:
c. 1410, Paris; BNF Fr. 565 fol. 23: comparison with VMs cosmos f68v3
1430-1440, Paris; Harley 334 f. 57: comparison with VMs "mermaid" You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Manuscripts, however cannot always be evaluated by their date of creation. They can sometimes be chronologically placed by their record of ownership. Thus the Apocalypse of S Jean, created in 1313, came to be in the library of of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy.
1419-1467 Burgundy: reign of Philip the Good; BNF Fr. 13096 f 18, the representation of an Agnus Dei image: comparison with the VMs critter You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
1430 - > Burgundy; the Order of the Golden Fleece, historical record: comparison with the VMs critter You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Contributions appreciated.
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| Logic issues |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 26-04-2020, 07:21 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (33)
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When reading in papers, blog posts, forum contributions related to the Voynich MS, I regularly run into issues with the logic applied. Sometimes these are obvious, but sometimes they are not, and the logic works like a smoke screen that does not allow us to see clearly. I am sure that in many cases this is not even intentional.
I don't want to start the 'complete list of logical errors' here, but there are a few typical cases that stand out.
In a recent Spanish paper, I once again encountered the problem where weak evidence is used to negate strong evidence. A typical issue is that evidence is not weighted on its objective strength, but on whether it is favourable or unfavourable to one's thoughts.
Another common error is the non-sequitur. A conclusion simply does not follow from the evidence provided. Even when it may seem quite logical at first sight.
The case that I keep running into I would like to call 'proof by example'. It may have a proper name, but I don't know it. It is related to 'disproof by counter-example'. Both may be valid in some cases, but are not valid in many other cases.
If one wants to prove that something is possible, then giving an example is sufficient of course.
However, let me illustrate the problem with an easy example.
Suppose I hold a fruit behind my back and I ask someone to guess what it is, and I tell him that the fruit is yellow. The answer could be: it has to be a lemon, because a lemon is yellow. This is what I would call 'proof by example'. It is obviously not valid, because it could also be a banana.
It is not sufficient to argue about the likelihood of the two cases, because there are even more yellow fruit, some which the guesser is not even familiar with.
If I gave additional hints, they would only work if they actually distinguish between the two.
Someone else might guess: "it is an orange". When I argue that oranges are not yellow, he could say: they are. Here, the perception of the guesser is blurred. It may seem as if I am making a strange point, but this sort of thing is happening all the time.
Since much of the discussions are quite subjective, it is rarely as easy as in this example.
I also could hold a red fruit behind my back, and suggest to the guesser that it is a banana. The guesser would say: no it can't be because bananas are yellow. Well, red bananas exist, so this is a case of incorrect disproof. This also happens all the time.
The Spanish paper I mentioned in the beginning considered:
- the Meso-american herb identifications
- the identification of a meso-american language by Hauer and Kondrak
strong evidence, much stronger than the radio-carbon dating of the paper (sic) of the MS.
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