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| Decomposition of the "gallows" characters |
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Posted by: Anton - 20-01-2016, 03:05 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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This is an interesting discussion in itself, so I decided to open a separate thread.
This thought occurred to me right after reading Cham's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about the "Curve-Line system" which, among other things, makes accent on how some Voynich characters can be decomposed into more elementary characters - the basic e or i and one of the possible "tail modifiers" - an idea generally expressed earlier by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
It appears that the gallows can well be decomposed in a similar way (please excuse awkward graphics, I'm not a professional web designer):
gallows_decomposed.jpg (Size: 39.24 KB / Downloads: 463)
All four plain gallows result from combining either EVA "q" or the vertical line with one of the two tail modifiers (marked as t1 and t2). Note that these tail modifiers, when combined with elementary e or i, mostly yield valid Voynichese characters:
- e + t1 = d
- e + t2 = g
- i + t1 = z (?)
- i + t2 = m
The only point of question here is the third expression. "z" is a valid character that is encountered, though rarely, in the VMS, but in contrast to i which is normally at a 45 deg. angle, z is perpendicular to the baseline. So it is not clear whether z is really meant to be a combination of i and t1.
A question may arise why p and t gallows, if indeed containing q as component, do lift over the text line and not extend below the baseline (as the normal q would). There is a ready answer - this is to make the "coverage" behaviour (explained You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) possible!
One also may argue that a standalone vertical is not met with in the VMS. Maybe it is not (I'm not sure), but I remember seeing vertical as a component in some rare characters.
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| The Voynich Ninja goes public |
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Posted by: Anton - 19-01-2016, 05:25 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (3)
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So, pox leber, the day has come when the long-awaited Voynich Forum goes public.
Actually, the forum has already been publicly available for some time (as the current participants do know), and we have had some very interesting
duscussions and, of course, the "killer application" - the Voynich Blogosphere Reader (thx David!).
But until today we did not make any major announcements or the like. Today we feel that most things required for comfortable discussion (such as forum structure, policies and features) are in place, so we are glad to invite all people interested in the VMS to participate.
If you run a Voynich blog or a website, or simply participate in any Voynich-related community, it would be great if you could make a small announcement about this forum there.
The idea of this forum was not an idle one, but one that aimed to address the actual and often-expressed need of a dedicated Voynich-discussion site. So we very much hope that it may fill the gap. We tried to plan the forum structure so that it not only provides for discussions, but is task-oriented.
We would like to thank all those who have been sharing their feedback. The forum will continue to be polished from the features and probably design perspective, so please excuse any potential deficiencies that may still be in there.
A big thank you to all members of the initial focus group (you know who you are).
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| The Impossibility of Double Gallows |
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Posted by: Emma May Smith - 16-01-2016, 10:09 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I've been playing around with some bigram tables lately, and though I haven't yet seen anything shockingly new, there is something reassuringly old which keeps pressing me to explain. Namely, that no two gallows characters can appear next to one another in the text. It likely seems as though such an obvious fact needs no explanation, but I feel it does.
By gallows characters I mean [k, t, f, p] and their bench versions [ckh, cth, cfh, cph]. Despite the 8x8 possible combinations for such characters, they basically do not exist in pairs. There are, as far as I can find, six exceptions in the whole text. Not six combinations, but six, individual, once occurring combinations of any two gallows characters.
Why is this important and why does it need explaining? Firstly, it is important because the way characters fit together should belie the linguistic facts underlying the text (assuming the text is linguistic, naturally). Next, because the statistics for gallows combinations are so stark, there being next to none.
Most combinations of characters appear a few times even if they do not normally go together. So [ak], a combination which should not ideally exist, gets about 40 hits; [oq] gets 20; [lm] gets about 10; and [en] 15. At these levels the stats are basically noise. They are likely no more than writing and reading errors, or missplit words. Even if they encode something genuine it cannot be a main part of the underlying language.
Yet, even with the possibility of errors, two gallows characters do not occur next to one another. Why? Well, here's my guess and what it means.
1) The gallows characters are distinct in essential form from all other characters. Many characters begin with a small round or straight stroke (such as what Cham's stroke theory is based on) and can be easily confused: [ei] for [a], [ch] for [ee], [r] for [s], among others. But gallows characters all begin with a long straight stroke above the line which only they use. Although the writer may have mistakenly written one gallows character when he meant another—and a reader likewise—they can only ever be confused for each other and never a non-gallows character.
2) Although gallows often come at the beginning of words they almost never come at the end. Even when a space between two words is ambiguous, the joining of two neighbouring words will not bring together two gallows. The reader cannot misread their way to double gallows.
3) The gallows all take the same place within the structure of a word. One loop or two, one leg or two, bench or no bench, no variation in their shape causes them to take a different place or makes it possible for them to occur together.
4) The structure of words is strict and variations simply don't occur all that often. This is a point made by researchers a long time ago but bears repeating. Characters fall into classes according to their distribution and role within words. They don't move about and do different things (I can only think of one possible exception to this). This is something fundamental to what they represent.
5) All the gallows must thus share some feature which puts them into the same class and makes them work in similar ways.
6) Their similar role and their similar appearance suggests that whomever invented the Voynich script did so with a clear understanding of not only how the underlying language worked, but also how languages in general work. The gallows itself as a character category is also a linguistic category.
7) Further, it is most likely a phonological category, which would explain why two sounds cannot appear together and why they must appear in certain places within words. Given the constraints on possible 'sound sets' within any language, and the number of distinct characters, the gallows as a feature can only represent a handful of phonological features.
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| Currier A and B |
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Posted by: Anton - 16-01-2016, 02:02 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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The original Currier's explanation can be found You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
"Currier A" and "Currier B" "languages" have been distinguished from each other by statistically significant peculiarities in formation of sequences.
Of course, it was made clear from the beginning that Currier A and B are not languages in the common sense of the word, the term "language" is used only formally for brevity. We do not know what is the real underlay mechanism or phenomenon that leads to the differences observed.
The problem is that while A and B are different, they are not totally different. Namely, there are vords that occur both in Currier A and B. In the course of working upon my latest blog post, I made some initial screening on the "Voynich stars" occurrences in the botanical folios with respect to Currier A and B. This was not included in the paper and the examination was far from comprehensive, but off-hand I did not see any strong correlation between star occurrences and Currier language. E.g., "dayside" (f68r1) and "nightside" (f68r2) stars on general may occur both in Currier A and Currier B. A given star may occur both in Currier A and B. E.g. the most frequent star of "otol" occurs mainly in Currier A, but has two occurrences in Currier B (these stats are limited to plant folios only). "otor", if I am not mistaken, happens roughly equally between Currier A and B.
The question is whether there has been any investigation of vords with respect to Currier languages. Which vords do occur only in Currier A or only in Currier B? Which vords occur both in A and B? Do all labels with significant frequency count occur both in A and B? The latter question, as you understand, is aimed at establishing whether labels are Currier-invariant.
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| Nick Pelling addresses the London Fortean Society this Feb 25, 2016 |
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Posted by: david - 12-01-2016, 08:28 PM - Forum: News
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Nick Pelling has announced he will be addressing The Fortean Society on the Voynich this Feb 25 in London. His press release reads:
Quote:I’ve been persuaded by the lovely people at the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to give a talk next month (25th February 2016, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 7.30pm for an 8pm start, £4/£2 concs) on the weird (and occasionally wonderful) Voynich Manuscript.
If you haven’t been to an LFS event before, they start about 8pm with a “Fortmanteau” (a Fortean news round-up), followed by the main speaker for most of an hour. Then, after a 20-minute break, there’s a Q&A, finishing at 10-ish, optionally followed by a drink and a chat at the bar. As normal, I’m expecting to be assailed with questions on just about every cipher mystery going: which should be excellent fun. If any Cipher Mysteries readers plan to come along, please let me know!
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
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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
- Replies (3)
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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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