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It is not Chinese
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Month names collection / ...
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Which plaintext languages...
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Favorite Plant Tournament...
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Favorite Plant Tournament...
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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...
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Visual dictionary of the ...
Forum: Analysis of the text
Last Post: anyasophira
12-06-2025, 02:40 AM
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| It must be a language - because how much about linguistics did they know so long ago? |
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Posted by: addekallstrom - 15-11-2024, 11:30 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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One of the most interesting things about this manuscript is that it follows certain hard rules about texts and corpus. Specifically with reference to things like hapax legomena, which I find fascinating in and of itself (I used hapax legomena for a small section of my master's thesis).
It has always made me wonder: how much of the rules of natural language was known in 14th century HRE/Central Europe?
Like, suppose it is all a big hoax, would the hoaxer have been aware that all corpus have a set amount of hapax legomena? Would he have planned for it in commissioning the book? Would he have expected his buyer to look for hapax legomena, and that the potential buyer might have looked at the text and gone: "Hmrph, not enough hapax legomena, clearly not a language."
If that wasn't known, then there's no way that it would happen accidentally, right?
How much do we know about what they knew about conlangs in the 14th century?
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| It cannot be a language - in reference to Koen's latest video |
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Posted by: addekallstrom - 15-11-2024, 11:23 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (9)
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Koen did a fantastic video about a month ago where he showed that Voynich really only has 8 functional letters. I've racked my brains trying to come up with any language even close to that and the closest I can think of is if Japanese dropped the diacritics and the syllabary structure of the written language. They would still end up with 14 characters!
Vowels:
a
i
u
e
o
Consonants:
k
s
t
n
h
m
y
r
w
This is setting aside the fact that there are still five more consonants in the Japanese language, g z d b p, which are currently marked by diactritics. I'm not sure if a Japanese speaker would be able to comfortable read a text without diacritics. You could also, perhaps, merge n and m into one one sound as the ん (n) can make both [n] and [m] sounds depending on what sounds follow it.
So, bending and breaking every concievable rule, Japanese can, at best, get down to 13 characters, and in doing so making the reading process quite arduous. And thats 60% more characters than the Voynich manuscript has!
It just can't be a language. It cannot...
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| Was the color original? A (very crude) analysis of color in Herbal A and Herbal B |
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Posted by: addekallstrom - 08-11-2024, 11:02 AM - Forum: Physical material
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Hi!
This is my first post, I am not a color expert, I am not a statistician, but I do have some interesting data that someone more qualified could expand upon.
In some of the recent YouTube videos by Koen, it was argued (I thought very persuasively) that the scribes also painted the paintings. This made me wonder: can we see a difference in what colors are used on the flowers? Can this be used to determine if the color is original or if it was added later?
My contention is the following:
(a) if the color was added later, there would be no difference in coloring between Herbal A and Herbal B, since a later painter would not know the difference.
thus,
(b) if there is any noticable difference in how color is used between Herbal A and Herbal B, it must mean that the color is original.
I conducted a very simple test. I separated all paintings of flowers into Herbal A or Herbal B on voynichese.com
I then asked a simple question: "what colors are found on the page?" and did a simple "yes/no" for each color I found.
I grouped it the following way:
It is very simple, and not very precise, but having gone through every image of flowers in Herbal A and Herbal B, I did find some striking results:
Herbal A colors:
Herbal B colors:
As you can see, there is a stark difference between the usage of the color red.
The only pages where Herbal B uses red are: f40v, f46v, f55r, and f95r1.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. might actually be brown and not even red. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. only uses a miniscule amount of red, if not a very reddish brown. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. uses a reddish brown again.
f95r1 is the only Herbal B where I feel that red is definitely used, and it is only small dots.
Compare that to the use of red (or very reddish brown) which is used extensively, on basically half of all pages, in Herbal A.
This indicates at the very least that the scribe of Herbal B didn't like red. Or perhaps that Herbal B wasn't completely finished, since there is white on almost every single Herbal B page, and maybe red was only used as a finishing color(?).
In any way, speculation aside, there is a clear, stark difference in the usage of the color red between Herbal A and Herbal B. This could not have been the case if the color was added later by someone who didn't know the difference between Herbal A and Herbal B.
My humble conclusion, therefore, is that the color was added by the scribes. I am sure that someone better equipped to do these kinds of experiments could find even more robust research. I am not very good at these things.
Thank you for reading.
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| Aott-naL |
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Posted by: Jon Bold - 02-11-2024, 05:24 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I have been looking at the VM for a few years and I think I have some incremental ideas about the text and some ideas about what the VM is. I am not going to “read it to you”, I would rather show you how to read it. I hope you can recognize and handle the genuine article.
Now, I am going to swim upstream against a lot of popular answers out there and say some things nobody else has said. Starting with: The images of plants, etc. were on the pages before the texts were written. Most of the text has nothing to do with the images.
I think what’s written here is music, a melody line, perhaps in a pentatonic scale, but the lyrics are missing. Could it be liturgical music? Not gregorian chant but perhaps plainsong. If so, we know the words. One of the reasons it is hard for us to believe this is music is how weird and convoluted the Italian system of music is that we use today.
Here is some information the cryptologists should be interested in. There is one short straight line segment in the midst of each of the characters. Most of the characters of the text are distracting serifs, entry swirls, exit swirls etc. the informative part of the character is often nothing more than a horizontal line segment, a vertical line segment, a diagonal line segment, three or four parallel line segments, a cruciform, or a saltier.
Which leaves only about five to nine basic characters, not enough for an alphabet. This is not language. It is a (non-Tironian) shorthand or a code. There are enough characters for a musical scale of one “octave”.
There are other reasons why I think this is a private system for documenting a melody. Notice how often consecutive lines differ by one or very few characters. Typical of hymns. I suspect His Majesty, with a good sense of pitch, was writing the melody down while listening to it.
There are some specific characters with tentative meaning: Starting many lines, there is a common character made of four line segments connected with loopy corners, that means “Four Beats”. Trace this character in the air, starting with a rising line and you will feel like you are a conductor. It is often followed by four characters which I think are notations about those four beats.
Similarly, the character made of three line segments with two loopy top corners means “Three Beats” and is often followed by three characters.
“Two Beats” looks like “three beats” but the upper left loop is missing. It would be followed by two characters.
There are many examples where a beat character is written over the first character in a line. Perhaps the scribe wrote the line and came back to fill in the beat character after counting the beats.
A space between characters might be a repeat or sustain of the preceding character. Or, it might be a natural break between lines of text. But, they seem useful in locating the beginning of a string of characters, where we will find one of the “beat” characters, which tell us how many characters follow.
This makes the character that looks like an (8) and the character that looks like an (o) special characters.
If I am at all correct about any of this, then we should be able to count up the beats in a line of text to know the meter of it, and possibly relate our findings to known examples of very old music, like Veni Veni Emmanuel, or Personent Hodie.
I will venture a guess. The horizontal line is the tonic and the same line with a vertical line above it is the octave. I have no proof. I may substitute values into the other symbols to see if this turns into recognizable music.
On another subject, The ladies. There are multiple sketches of Her majesty receiving a barrel of cool water and a bottle of wine. Fifteenth century gynecology? On the top of page 140 ( left 78) Her Majesty is, isn’t it obvious, cleaning out her fallopian tubes. There is only one lady in all those sketches.
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| Variation among hatchmarks ("curves" and "lines") |
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Posted by: pfeaster - 27-10-2024, 03:51 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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(23-10-2024, 11:26 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What's really important is that, in spite of the similarity between the independent transliterations, a visual inspection of the actual handwriting shows that there are different forms of g. One clearly has a c shape to start with, while the other is more similar to m. The same situation as with Eva-r and Eva-s really.
Another way of expressing this observation would be to say that the flourish which [g] and [m] share in common may be found --
(1) attached to a clear "c shape" or "curve," which makes it a clear [g].
(2) attached to a clear "minim" or "line," which makes it a clear [m].
(3) attached to a stroke that appears to fall somewhere between a "curve" and a "line" -- which could be interpreted as "a [g] that is more similar to an [m]" or "an [m] that is more similar to a [g]" or "a glyph that might be either [g] or [m]."
-- and that the same range of possibilities likewise exists for the flourish which [s] and [r] share in common.
But rather than saying there are "different forms of [g]" and so forth for each of the EVA glyph types involved, it might be more efficient to consider the range of different underlying forms of hatchmarks -- which I'm using here as a generic term for "curves" and "lines" and any other strokes that seem to fall functionally into the same category with them.
One page that can be used to illustrate how much variation there is among hatchmark forms is f6v. It features some nicely typical "curves":
f6v_001.jpg (Size: 5.45 KB / Downloads: 288)
And also some nicely typical "lines":
When there's a sequence of hatchmarks (whether "curves" or "lines"), they often look very similar to each other, suggesting that the scribe wrote them in rapid succession using a similar motion, or at least a motion that "evolved" progressively over the course of the sequence. This is typical.
But in some places on this particular page, "curves" and "lines" seem to converge on another form that doesn't fall clearly into one or the other category. In these examples --
-- the two examples on the left are, I think, reasonably clear as far as EVA glyph identifications go, but the "curve" is rotated counterclockwise so that its upper part points more directly upwards, while the "line" has a conspicuous upturn at the bottom (more conspicuous cases like this can be found elsewhere, but I'm limiting myself to this one page for now). The remaining examples are less clear. If they're "curves," they lack the upper part of the curve -- they look more like [L]. But if they're "lines," the first stroke is oddly vertical -- and in the example at the bottom, it certainly looks as though there's a contrast between these forms (two of them in a row) and the preceding "lines." To my eye, these forms look more like each other than they do like either typical "curves" or typical "lines," even though word morphology would suggest the forms must sometimes be one and sometimes the other.
And what about the final curve or line here? -->
On top of this, we also see some tokens of an alternate form of curve that looks more like [<] than [C] -- a phenomenon also found on some other pages (e.g. f1r):
But then is the first glyph here [r], or is it [s] with the [<] form of curve? Those two alternatives would seem to be fiendishly hard to tell apart, unless from context.
More to follow.
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| Some additional references to Voynich's Jesuit manuscripts |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 26-10-2024, 09:03 AM - Forum: Provenance & history
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For quite some time I have been intrested in the correspondence between Belle Da Costa Greene, famous librarian of the Morgan library in New York, and the art historian Bernard Berenson, who lived in his own Villa near Florence.
The reason for this interest is that Voynich knew Berenson and had shown him some of his 'fine manuscripts'.
Fortunately, I learned from Lisa that this correspondence (the part written by Greene to Berenson) has not only been digitised, it has been fully transcribed and is available online.
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It is truly fascinating to read through this material.
Unfortunately, Greene has destroyed everything that had been sent to her privately, so Berenson's letters are now lost.
I have collected what little I could find about Voynich and his manuscripts You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
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| Positional Probability of EVA letters |
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Posted by: RobGea - 25-10-2024, 01:24 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Probability distribution of EVA letters within a random VMS word
There is a really nice blog post here:
Letter Distributions in the English Language and Their Relations -- Tim Hargreaves
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I didn't do that blog post justice and full description of this method can be found there, but i ended up with this
it's a nice little visualization of where the EVA-letters are likely to be found in a vord.
If we select a random word from the ZL-3a transcription of the vms,
then for the EVA-lettters in that word, these graphs show where in the word that letter is likely to occur.
Preparation:
Transciption file ZL3a-n.txt
ivtt.exe -x7 -a2 -@L ZL3a-n.txt ZL2023_Clean.txt
removed any words with:
apostrophes
? marks
rare chars
single letter words
added the word 'vw' at the end -necessary for R-code to run
Description:
Glyphs have been ordered according to the similarity of their probability distributions.
X-axis : Position of a letter within a word:: Leftmost -> beginning of word, Rightmost -> end of word
Y-axis : Probability:: bottom is 0 (never occurs) -> top is 1 (certain to occur)
Labels : EVA-letter (black), VMS Glyph (gray)
Low frequency glyphs not shown
Underlying grey plots are the exact plots
Colored overlays are the Loess smoothed data ( to reduce noise )
Explanation:
We can see with the group < p, q, c, s > that the plot starts near the top left of the graph and descends quickly as it moves to the right.
Showing these glyphs have a high probability of appearing at the start of a word and have a low Probability at the end of a word.
The roughly opposite effect is observed in the groups < y, r, m, g > and < l > and < n >.
Their plot starts at the bottom left, indicating a low probability of these letters occurring at the beginning of the word.
The plots stay low, denoting their continued low chance of being found as we proceeed further into the word.
Then their plots rise steeply showing that these letters are more likely to be found at the end of a word.
Letters < e > and < i > have an single peak in the middle of the X-axis indicating they are most likely to be found in the middle of a word.
=====================================
A generalized grouping can be described like so:
Code: EVA-letters Most Probable Position
P Q C S mostly word-beginners
A O F D first-two-thirds of a word
K T H mostly mid-word
E I mid-word
Y R M G word-enders
L mostly word-enders
N word-enders
For a detailed study on glyph position see < S.Palmer, Voynich MS glyph position stacks >
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N.B
3 Statistical artefacts are noted:
< EVA-q > the loess smooothing goes awry here, it should follow the black line better.
< EVA-o > the graph shows a small second peak at about 2/3 of the X-axis, this peak is not in the data source.
< EVA-l >, < EVA-n > are colored differently because of the statistic used to generate the colored groups.
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| n-grams while ignoring spaces? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 20-10-2024, 04:46 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I'm getting a lot of comments on my videos (much more than I can answer appropriately), and sometimes they are really good questions. What I like the most is that a lot of people are thinking about the system, rather than coming up with obscure languages.
On my first video about entropy, @stoplight2554 commented:
Quote:wouldnt this suggest some sort of n-gram based system? there has to be some trade off between character length of a text block and encoded characters per length. this sort of has to assume that spaces are to be ignored though..
also, this only works if the ability to predict the next character from the last is not 'continuous' across a section of text. if it reliably fails to predict at a certain interval, then you have your n-gram length. if it never fails to predict the next character, then its too deterministic to express any meaning whatsoever (unless the meaning itself is the repeated pattern)
I like the way they think: the system does suggest n-grams as a possible part of the solution. They also take into account that considering heavy use of n-grams would almost certainly mean that spaces aren't spaces.
Their experiment sounds interesting: you make a long string of characters with spaces removed, and test at which intervals entropy goes up. But would this be testable at all? You'd need to make choices for parsing (e.g. what's your initial treatment of [iin]?). And a single missing or extra character (by scribal error) would throw the system off.
Maybe it's more useful to think in terms of entropy, which is more of an average? So like, how easy is it to predict two characters over when spaces are removed?
I'd also assume that consistent use of, let's say, bigrams, would inflate your alphabet to such an extent that it would become impossible to compare to other texts?
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