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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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| Folio 66r marginalia |
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Posted by: Anton - 01-01-2016, 04:45 PM - Forum: Marginalia
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One of the advantages of the format of a "forum" is that if you have no time for development of an idea, you can just throw it in with a hope that it may be picked up by other participants. 
So do I with respect to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. marginalia.
It is notable that at least two of the three plain text marginalia words have been emended.
Where there was "mel", now is "del".
Where there was "mul", now is "mus".
More than that, it looks like the first word was emended as well. It was either "en" (and then "d" was prepended, making it "den"), or it was *en (with the first letter hard to distinguish), later corrected to "den".
Three corrections in three words in a row give rise to a natural question: what for? These words appear as a label to the objects nearby depicted. So it looks like the guy depicted some objects, then labeled them, and then suddenly he decided that the labeling is not correct (!). OK, this is not so very probable.
What else, then? It occurs to me that the plain text of the label may have been associated in some way with the Voynichese text above. So after putting down all this text (Voynichese and plain text), the guy then got afraid that this association may lead to the readers' breaking the Voynichese code, so he emended the letters to change the words to other valid words (e.g. "mul" and "mus" are both valid words in some language, as well as "mel" and "del" are, etc.).
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| The "gallows" characters |
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Posted by: Anton - 24-12-2015, 12:40 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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There has been much discussion as to the essence of the "gallows" characters in the VMS. Basically, there are several types of gallows there:
- "plain" gallows - EVA p, f, k and t
- composite "benched" gallows - such as cph and the like - actually we don't know if they represent a single character or a sequence of "plain" characters
- "embellished" gallows - which well may be just actual embellishments of the "plain" gallows
- weird gallows with one leg in one "word" and other leg in another - notably, EVA t exhibits such behaviour.
Let us consider the "plain" gallows. They exhibit some interesting properties:
- They have not so many variations – just four (p, f, k and t).
- They are not rare in the corpus.
- They occur very frequently as the starting character of the paragraph. Sometimes many paragraphs in a row begin with the gallows.
- They seem to never occur in the end of any distinct high-level logical entity (paragraph or label). I was not able to confirm this 100% due to the absence of the respective query in any Voynich tool, but I found no occurrences offhand.
What set of elements could have such properties? It occurred to me that a set of articles is a corresponding match.
E.g. (modern) English has two articles – “a” and “the” (if we add the "an" word form, we will have three), German has five (der, die, das, ein, eine) etc.
Of course, the adoption of this idea would mean that Voynich spaces are not real spaces and that there are real spaces where we don't observe them in the MS.
One objection to this idea refers to short labels including gallows. E.g., consider otol (Voynich "star" in f68r). If t here stands for an article, then it is strange to have only one letter before the article in a given phrase. However, what if o does not stand for a single letter (as t does not, in our assumption)? What if o is a shorthand for some notion (like "star" or "stone")? OK, then we have the sequence <notion X> <article> <notion X> l. Not very promising, unless this is something like "star of the stars..." or "ol" is not the same as "o"+"l".
Well, although this article idea probably does not apply directly, I vaguely suspect that something may be developed out of here.
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| Folio 68r charts |
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Posted by: Anton - 17-09-2015, 04:17 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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The below considerations are too raw to be published as an article, so I decided to share them in informal manner.
I was re-reading my own recent article dedicated to the Voynich "stars", when suddenly it occurred to me that the total number of stars in f68r1 and f68r2 (including unlabeled) equals 88.
The interesting fact is that the number of standardized constellations is 88. This is, of course, no more than a curious coincidence, because the definitions and number of constellations evolved over time. However, this made me wonder whether the "stars" in f68r1 and f68r2 might not represent constellations.
A medieval astrological chart would naturally be represented in ecliptic coordinates, that is the "equatorial" plane would be that of the ecliptic. Note that Sun is depicted on the circumference - which would be the ecliptic. This is logical from the astronomical point of view, although I'm afraid this is not common from the perspective of the star maps of this kind.
In the supposed northern, or what I call "dayside" (f68r1), chart we have 29 labeled stars, in the southern (nightside, f68r2) we have 24 labeled and 35 unlabeled stars.
Suppose the labeled stars stand for known constellations. So we need 29 northern and 24 southern constellations.
Ptolemy introduced 48 constellations, of which 47 still survive, and Argo Navis was later split into three distinct constellations, but in 15th century it was Argo Navis still. These 48 constellations can be subdivided as follows:
21 northern (in respect to the ecliptic): Andromeda, Aquila, Auriga, Bootes, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Corona Borealis, Cygnus, Delphynus, Draco, Equuleus, Hercules, Lyra, Pegasus, Perseus, Serpens, Triangulum, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Sagitta, Ophiuchus.
15 southern: Ara, Argo Navis, Canis Major, Canis Minor, Centaurus, Cetus, Corona Australis, Corvus, Crater, Eridanus, Hydra, Lepus, Lupus, Orion, Piscis Austinus.
12 ecliptical (zodiacal): Aquarius, Aries, Cancer, Capricornus, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Pisces, Sagittarius, Scorpius, Taurus, Virgo.
The problem is whether the zodiacal constellations (residing on the ecliptic) would be attributed to the northern or to the southern hemisphere. In contemporary star charts they are shown partly in northern, partly in southern (which is the actual state of things), but here we have each constellation (supposedly) represented by only one asterisk character, so that's the question. Are they there at all? If they are, then how are they distributed between the two? (They can't be all in northern or all in southern because that would be 21+12 = 33 for northern or 15+12 = 27 for southern which exceeds the actual amount of labeled "stars").
In any case, even with 48 constellations of Ptolemy we lack 29+24-48 = 7 constellations. I think that Ulug Begh's constellation system did not differ much from that of Ptolemy, so we need to search for missing pieces elsewhere.
Let us look at Europe.
Circa 1450 the constellation of Crux began to be considered as a standalone constellation.
Later additions seemed to be Coma Berenices and Antinous You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which are both northern constellations (Antinous is now obsoleted), and then 12 more southern constellations published in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which actually relied upon the globe of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. who, in turn, took information from the Dutch naval expedition of Keyser and Houtman. Those constellations are:
Apus, Chamaeleon, Dorado, Grus, Hydrus, Indus, Musca, Pavo, Phoenix, Triangulum Australe, Tucana, Volans.
Of course, this is far later than what the VMS is dated to. But considering the Ptolemy's nomenclature alone, the balance is more or less adequate. Supposing 8 of zodiacal constellations topping up the northern side to 29, with 12-8 = 4 left going to the southern side and yielding 15+4 = 19 for it, we then need only 24-19 = 5 more southern constellations to complete the picture. Where were they taken from? Perhaps from some other influence, such as Chinese. As far as I know, the Chinese constellation system includes much more than 48 constellations, so there is certainly no direct mapping. But some southern constellations known to the Chinese might have been "borrowed". Europeans were in China since 13th c., so that would be nothing surprising.
What for the unlabeled stars? While the 23 stars forming the outer circle of f68r2 may be considered as an "embellishment", at a minimum we are still left with 88-29-24-23 = 12 unlabeled stars. From the perspective of the author this looks like "I know that there are constellations, but I don't know how they are called". Does this look as something real? I don't know.
What do you think?
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