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Month names collection / ...
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Favorite Plant Tournament...
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Favorite Plant Tournament...
Forum: Voynich Talk
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Favorite Plant Tournament...
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Upcoming Voynich program ...
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[split] Color annotations...
Forum: Voynich Talk
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Wherefore art thou, aberi...
Forum: Imagery
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Visual dictionary of the ...
Forum: Analysis of the text
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An attempt at extracting ...
Forum: Analysis of the text
Last Post: anyasophira
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| Rosettes Page: In The Beginning |
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Posted by: Dana Scott - 23-11-2024, 11:19 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (2)
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I believe that the lower left rosette on the 9-folio foldout page
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is a depiction of God's creation of the "heaven[s] and the earth".
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Genesis 1
King James Version
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
This volvelle is shown in Hebrew Cosmology:
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Notice the column shapes as drawn in the white areas separated by the oceans and seas:
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God's commands from above heaven emanate from the cloud burst located to the upper right of the volvelle:
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At the lower left corner of the volvelle is a depiction of the clock which started at the "beginning of time":
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The canopy in the middle of the volvelle includes the first set of stars seen in the universe:
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Perhaps the "words" listed here depict the Days of Creation including the Sabbath?
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Some statistics and analysis regarding VMS (words & letters) |
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Posted by: argo2001 - 23-11-2024, 01:02 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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So I did some frequency analysis of the text. I'm still processing the most of it, but I wanted to share some stats I got. It's possible some of these data have been posted or done before by someone else, but I couldn't find it.
The data might not be 100% precise due to transcription errors. I used transcription from Landini-Stolfi. I have limited dataset of old Latin and English (only around 5000 words)
Total letters (excluding spaces): 194 771
Total words: 37 852
My entropy calculations of text based on words:
Voynich - 10.5957 bits
English - 7.9068 bits
Old Latin - 9.8516 bits
My entropy calculations of text based on letters:
Voynich - 3.8689 bits
English - 4.1317 bits
Old Latin - 4.0166 bits
- Vast majority of words are unique = 6126 (70,54%) of words appears only once. 941 (10,84%) appear twice, and 382 (4,40%) thrice. That's 85% of words that are unique. These unique words make up 24,18% of the entire text. Truly unique words (they appear once) make up 16,18% of the entire text.
- The word that appears the most (as a standalone) is "daiin" - 820 times (2,17%) Here are some data regarding "daiin":
(the top row lists if the string "daiin" appears as a standalone word, or if it's a part of a different word. If it's part of a different word, I list if it has initial, medial or final position.
the bottom row lists what is the most common letter that precedes/follows it in all cases. If the word is a standalone, I list what words commonly precede/follow it - ex. "chol daiin")
- The second word that appears the most (as a standalone) is "ol" - 504 times (1,33%) - but it appears over 5000 times as a part of a word.
- The word frequency in Voynichese (light blue), 15th Century Latin (Yellow), Modern English (dark blue/purple). I believe we already knew that it resembles Zipfs Law, but I'll show it anyway. Note: I don't have sufficient data to feed my algorithm regarding other languages, that's why English and Latin are so low. My Voynich algorithm worked with 37852 words, English and Latin with around 5000 words. I'd be happy if someone provided me with some old relevant texts that I could feed into the algorithm. Let me know!
Independently:
The most common combinations of words that appear in the text are:
"or aiin" - 51 times
"s aiin" - 44 times
"ar aiin" - 32 times
"chol daiin" - 30 times
"chol chol" - 21 times
"qokeedy qokeedy" - 20 times
(Some) of the longest strings that appear multiple times in the text are:
"ol shedy qokedy qokeedy" - 2 times
"qokeedy qotedy qokeedy" - 2 times
"qokedy qokeedy qokeedy" - 2 times
"qokedy qokedy qokedy" - 3 times
"sheedy qokedy chedy" - 3 times
"chol daiin chkaiin" - 2 times
Regarding individual letters/symbols:
Frequency analysis of all letters:
Analysis of letters - do they appear standalone, initial, medial or as final?
So yeah, these are some of my results - if you have request or are interested in more, let me know.
If you have any questions, ask.
Feel free to draw some of your conclusions in the comments.
Please, if you have some digitalized transcripts of original 15th century texts or similar (any language), share them with me. 
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| Podcast |
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Posted by: LisaFaginDavis - 20-11-2024, 06:56 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (3)
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The latest episode of the "This is Love" podcast is devoted to the VMS, featuring myself, Claire Bowern, Cary Rapaport, and Koen Gheuens:
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| New video: "Is the Voynich Manuscript fake?" |
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Posted by: Koen G - 19-11-2024, 11:38 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (74)
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I finally finished my new video. This one is about fraud, forgery and fakery of all kinds. Meaning, lack of meaning, good intentions, bad intentions, John Dee, Wilfrid Voynich or the Crossbowman.
This video is the one that took me the longest to make so far. It includes both known and new research and highlights some lesser known aspects as well. As usual, I tried to learn some new animations along the way, and attempted to keep it visually interesting.
I owe thanks to Lisa, Rene and Marco for their input and factchecking of the script, and to Cary for reviewing the video before publication.
I also provided English subtitles, which should make it a bit easier to watch for those who like them.
Enjoy!
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| Why create such a complex cipher? |
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Posted by: addekallstrom - 17-11-2024, 04:07 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (26)
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Hi!
I was listening to another video about the manuscript today and in the QnA section, someone asked: "What motivations would there be for creating it as a hoax with random gibberish?"
I wasn't too impressed with the answer, and instead it got me thinking the complete opposite way: If you are writing a book on [botany/women's health/astronomy/etc] and you want to encode it, why create such an incredibly difficult to crack cipher?
As I was thinking about this, I was reminded of the Zodiac ciphers from the 1970s. I'm sure most cipher nerds know that the Z-340 was cracked about four years ago now. It was cracked through a computer brute forcing every imaginable way to encode a text, and eventually, after the computer had cracked it, the investigators realized that not only had Zodiac used a highly sophisticated way of scrambling letters; he had made mistakes! So it was only possible to crack a very difficult cipher with mistakes through brute force computer. How is it that that the Voynich Manuscript has survived even longer, and more importantly, why the need to create this level of difficult cipher?
If all you are doing is hiding information about botany, why do you need to go to such lengths as the scribes did? Iirc both Alan Turing and the guy who cracked the Japanese code in WW2 worked on the manuscript (and failed), so, if you're a 14th century botanist who wants to hid information about your plants, why do you need a cipher that is more difficult to crack than the Germans and Japanese used in a world war?
There is a really good video about the Z-340 cipher here on YouTube (link below). Looking at that, the sheer power of computer brute force solving, I am feeling less and less that there is any meaning to the text. And I ask: "why the need to create such a complex cipher?"
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| How could it be proven it's a medieval hoax? |
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Posted by: djurpet - 17-11-2024, 03:17 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Apologies if this has already been covered. I'm just wondering if such a thing would even be possible to prove. For example, lets assume that a few scribes from the 15th century knew that a local ruler is willing to pay a lot of money for obscure/occult books and they decided to make one in a script that visually has some resemblance to a real language but has no meaning.
We know that certain symbols are almost exclusively used as suffixes or prefixes so they must have had some algorithm/method for generating the text. If someone finds a convincing method for generating voynichese words (maybe that's already been done, idk) would that be enough evidence to conclude it's a medieval hoax? Or what other evidence would be needed?
The problems with this theory are that there was probably no need for the makers of VM to bother with a method for generating words for a meaningless text that they wanted to sell to someone - they could have just arranged the letters totally randomly. Also, there are some words that are concentrated in parts of the book that cover similar topics which could suggest that the text actually has meaning - or it could suggest that the scribe who worked on the herbal parts maybe had one method for generating words and the scribe who worked on the cosmological part had a slightly different method.
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