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| Voynich Article in The Atlantic |
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Posted by: LisaFaginDavis - 08-08-2024, 03:27 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (17)
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Here it is! A very lengthy piece in The Atlantic about my thirty-year friendship with the VMS and new directions for research. Shout-outs to the Team Malta, Claire Bowern, and others:
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Enjoy!
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| Relations among pattern studies? |
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Posted by: pfeaster - 08-08-2024, 12:55 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (27)
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Following up on one facet of Voynich Manuscript Day:
(05-08-2024, 08:13 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.All research was well presented, for example Emma explained statistical concepts well.... But as the data was being presented in the text-focused talks, I felt myself losing the forest through the trees, wondering how things fit into the bigger picture.... I think it would be extremely valuable to the community if someone was able to write an "explain like I'm five" version of these talks, trying to focus on the bigger picture and how Emma's, tavie's and Patrick's findings relate to each other. This might be an assignment even the authors themselves struggle with, but it would be an invaluable exercise. I'm sure I won't be able to do justice to this assignment on my own, but it's interesting enough that I didn't want to leave it unaddressed.
The main thing I think our three presentations shared in common was the goal of searching for structural patterns outside words as earnestly as people have long been searching for structural patterns inside them. We each investigated cases where the actual prevalence of a text element (glyph, word, etc.) turns out to be significantly greater or lesser in a particular context than it "should" be in a random distribution.- In tavie's presentation, we saw that there are many patterns specific to line starts, line ends, and top rows -- more patterns, and stronger ones, than past casual assessments have suggested. Her detection of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. felt especially new and exciting.
- In Emma's presentation, we saw that there are many patterns in which features of words pair preferentially or dispreferentially with features of adjacent words -- not just word-break combinations (linking the end of one word to the start of the next word), but also pairs of successive beginnings and endings, or words that simply contain particular features anywhere within them. Her introduction of z-scores brings valuable statistical rigor to this type of study.
- In my presentation, I tried to show that treating glyph sequences within words and between words as parts of the same system, rather than analyzing these separately, lets us identify some interesting cyclical patterns that don't necessarily coincide with words as units but do fairly well at "predicting" longer repeating sequences. Here are the slides and script in case anybody wants them:
feaster_vmd_presentation_text.pdf (Size: 113.71 KB / Downloads: 13)
feaster_vmd_presentation_slides.pdf (Size: 961.4 KB / Downloads: 18)
Emma and I were both examining features based on their positions relative to other features, and we even identified a few of the same patterns, although from different perspectives and using very different methods. For example, we both identified [dy] as less likely than expected to be followed by [k]:
As I mentioned in Q&A, I've also tried studying higher-order transitional probabilities, such as third-order [dyk>a], which is the same glyph sequence as Emma's [dy.ka], but again, approached from a different perspective and, in that case, broken up differently. Even higher-order transitional probabilities, such as [ydaii>n] or [qokeedy>d], would similarly overlap with some of Emma's start-start and end-end pairings, especially when populated by wild-card characters as in [y***>n] or [q*****>d], except that they'd be defined by an intervening glyph count (with all the attendant uncertainty over what counts as one glyph) rather than by positions within words (with all the attendant uncertainty over word breaks). I sense potential weaknesses in both approaches, but I'm not sure how to get around them.
I assume there's got to be some connection between this type of glyph-by-glyph or word-by-word pattern and the other type of pattern described by tavie, centered on differences by line and paragraph position. After all, for those two types of pattern both to be valid, they must overlap and complement each other, and I even showed a few examples of transitional probabilities that vary strongly by location within lines and paragraphs. But how these two types of patterns interrelate with each other strikes me as still very much a mystery. Do they just coexist? Or do they both result from some other common factor? Or does one level of patterning somehow cause the other level of patterning?
In Q&A, I briefly suggested that the cumulative effect of glyph-by-glyph or word-by-word patterns might be responsible for some kinds of line pattern. If individual glyph-by-glyph or word-by-word patterns of preference are asymmetrical, tending towards certain combinations and away from others, that could perhaps account for some features being unevenly distributed within lines. But I've never been able to demonstrate any such thing statistically, so right now it's no more than an idle guess on my part. Another apparent tendency of certain glyphs to recur preferentially after an interval might account for the greater probability of [p] further along in lines that begin with [p], but it wouldn't offer any insight into the reasons for paragraph-initial [p] itself. (In Emma's analysis, I believe that relationship would translate into a start-anywhere combination.)
Or it could be the other way around. Different paragraph and line positions might cause glyph-by-glyph or word-by-word patterns to vary.
It seems there must be some relationship, but for now, I really don't know what it is, and I'm unsure how to go about trying to find out.
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| Summary of Voynich Day presentation on Line Patterns |
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Posted by: tavie - 08-08-2024, 01:41 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (12)
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I haven't been able to share the slides of the presentation I did at Voynich Day since it is 40 MB. This is because I recorded the audio into the slides themselves so I have to work out how to undo that. I'm also working on how to explain the work better but in the meantime, here's a summary of the presentation.
The aim was about outlining line patterns beyond immediately apparent ones such as gallows usually being the paragraph start initial; p and f appearing mostly on the Top Row; final m being disproportionately at Line End; initial a and ch rarely being at Line Start, etc. Do we see other distinct behaviour in initials and finals (and sometimes word-middle) at Line Start, Line End, and Top Row? Does this vary by scribe or do we see similar trends?
Line Behaviour at Key Positions (Line Start, Line End, Top Row)
My method is rather unsophisticated compared to Emma's; it's just comparing percentages. For the line patterns, firstly I took three large separate chunks for comparison: Herbal A by Lisa's Scribe 1; Balenological by Lisa's Scribe 2; and Stars by Lisa's Scribe 3. This was both to be able to confirm when there is/isn't a cross-scribal tendency but also to reduce distortions in the stats where scribes might cancel each other out, etc.
I also split the text according to its position: for each scribal section, I separated top row words, line start words, line end words, and the "pure middle" (though it does include the bottom row mid-line words) from each other. This was to help spot any "Top Row effects", "Line End effect", etc, and also limit them interfering with each other.
So for example, ch is 24% of middle initials in Herbal A. Ceteris paribus, we'd expect to see it be 24% of LS initials, which would be about 300 ch. We see only 64, so there are over 200 "missing" instances. This makes initial ch "averse" to Line Start.
General issues that could distort/affect statistics include uncertain word breaks (likely especially affecting LE initials); transcription errors; choosing to focus on the scribal level rather than the folio or even smaller level; and my general incompetence.
The three scribes did often show similar tendencies, even if the size of their gaps can vary. Key similarities include for initials:
- At Line Start: all three hate initial ch, and are attracted to initial y, d, s, hence the clusters ych, dch, etc. Simultaneously, all were attracted to /ch/ and /sh/ as word-middle glyphs, and /ai/ and /ee/
- At Line End: All were averse to initial q, ch, and sh.
- At Top Row (middle): All were averse to initial ch and attracted to initial o. Clusters like /opch/ are common.
- At Paragraph End: All were averse to initial q, and prefer initial ch
For finals:
- At Line Start: all three were averse to final y and attracted to final n
- At Line End: all averse to final y and attracted to final m
- At Top Row (middle): all were attracted to final y and averse to final n.
Despite these similarities, there were also some striking differences. The top ones included:
- At Line Start: Scribe 1 in Herbal A is attracted to initial o and q. But Scribe 2 and Scribe 3 are averse to initial o (with some variance in the subclusters), and Scribe 3 in Stars hates initial q
- At Line End: Scribe 1 in Herbal A absolutely loves initial da (as Marco points out, this can reflect Patrick's findings of d becoming more prevalent as you go rightward). Meanwhile, Scribe 2 and Scribe 3 are developing a fondness for rare clusters often beginning with l, r, etc and we see words that are either wholly or mostly exclusive to the Line End position.
- For finals, Scribe 1 in Herbal A really likes final or at Line Start. This isn't a passion particularly shared by the others, but Scribe 3 in Stars is a little attached to final r for Paragraph Start.
I tried some reckless mapping of "missing" glyphs to "surplus" glyphs. I won't reproduce this here. But sometimes there was a vague resemblance between the missing and surplus word types:
- Line Start is the obvious example. We see tons of missing initial ch, and simultaneously tons of surplus word-middle ch in clusters like ych, dch etc.
- Top Row is similar. In its middle, initial ch vanishes, and simultaneously clusters like opch or qopch appear.
These may well be the same word types but the numbers don't always match up, and the finals are often different.
Other times, there is little resemblance between missing word types and surplus word types:
- At Line Start, Scribe 2 and Scribe 3 tend to have large deficits for initial oka/ota/oke/ote words (with some exceptions), and for the q version e.g. initial qoka type words. But we don't see any clear simple surplus word types at Line Start that could be replacing them in sufficient numbers like initial ych etc might replace initial ch. If they are replaced by different word forms with the same meaning, we'd need to look at more creative mutations like initial s or d, which carry large surpluses at Line Start.
- The Line End patterns mentioned above. Scribe 1 in HA's love affair with initial da words, while Scribe 2 and 3 are exploring initial l, r words like "lol"...yet the missing word types don't look very similar and so are hard to match.
"Vertical Impact Effect"
This was based on looking at how often glyphs are immediately under each other at Line Start. On folio 10r, you can see two lines - the 9th and 10th - that both start with o. I call this a "vertical pair" and denote it as o-o.
What's odd is that we rarely see this vertical pair in Scribe 1's Herbal A. It's really odd since Scribe 1 loves starting lines with initial o (and the others hate it). My calculations (hopefully right) were that we should see over 40 o-o vertical pairs. Yet there's this one and...well you can check it out on Voynichese.com.
Simultaneously and suspiciously, we see a similarly sized surplus of o-q vertical pairs.
Scribe 1 in Herbal A really dislikes q-q vertical pairs despite loving q as a Line Start initial. Scribe 2 in Balneological also shows a distaste for q-q. Both show a fondness for q-ch and q-sh, despite ch and sh being averse to Line Starts.
We also see Scribe 1 in Herbal A being attracted to the y-o vertical pairs, and Scribe 2 in Balneological liking d-q vertical pairs. And y in Scribe 3 in Stars seems to like hanging out too much on the bottom row of paragraphs. There were other patterns but those were the ones I thought most worth highlighting.
This seemed really bizarre. It seems the lower glyph in the pair is conditioned on what the upper glyph is. Assuming lines were written in order, that is. Why might it occur?
- Is there an innate anti-duplication sentiment in the scribes where they hate reusing the same glyph immediately below another at Line Start (in the midline, there's more space to play around with)? But we don't see such a marked tendency with y-y or d-d. And s-s actually performs well.
- Is it about space saving or avoiding clashes with the glyphs below (e.g. q-t is messy)? But surely o-o is fine in this regard.
- Is it something to do with a role each glyph plays at Line Start? But what?
More general questions and thoughts
Does it also show scribal awareness, adapting to the circumstances and implied understanding of what they are writing? Or do the strong patterns imply there was a system of rules for them to blindly follow?
I couldn't think of a "natural", e.g. plaintext or linguistic reason for the Vertical Impact behaviour. They may well be at play for the other Line pattern behaviour above but it was hard for me to imagine they could be the main overarching cause.
Could the cause be that the text is meaningless? If meaningless, it doesn't really matter what glyphs are where. But these patterns would require a system with some strong and seemingly arbitrary rules, e.g. "Avoid writing an o directly under another o at Line Start and write a q instead; avoid writing a q under another q and write ch/sh instead, etc"
The same thing would apply if we consider the Line Start initials to be meaningless nulls attached to the real word as part of a cypher hypothesis.
If they are not nulls, are they real? And does that mean the "shorter" word in the midline is an abbreviation, e.g. ychol becomes chol (which as Koen noted is a really weird way to abbreviate)
And lastly as part of the cypher paradigm, if the "mappings" reflect homophones and abbreviations, the apparent interchangeability of glyphs may pose the risk of running out of plaintext letters and making it illegible for even the authorized reader, unless we posit some further internal distinctions or external references.
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| Solutions [discussion thread - moved] |
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Posted by: tavie - 06-08-2024, 10:54 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (57)
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In the wake of Voynich Manuscript Day, I've shared a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of all decipherment/language claims that the forum has discussed since its creation. Please do PM me about any missing ones or mistakes. So far we have 51, which is quite remarkable since 2016. I'm guessing the real number of solutions out there beyond the forum must be over a hundred.
It's interesting to count the number of solutions for each language. So far: - Olympic gold medal goes to Latin. We have 15 ones for this, almost 1/3 of the total.
- Trailing in the dust for joint silver are English and Hebrew with 4 each
- And bronze goes to Turkic with three.
Curiously, despite German often being suggested as a candidate language, I haven't yet found a single German solution recorded on the forum.
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| [ey] and [dy] Feature Patterns |
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Posted by: Emma May Smith - 06-08-2024, 06:16 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (12)
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One of the questions from my talk on Voynich Manuscript Day was about the differences between words ending [ey] and [dy], and the word immediately following them. I thought I would provide some more statistics and thoughts around this, and also ask for the opinions of others. (There were other questions too from my talk, but I'm so sorry, I didn't have chance to record them. I'm happy to look into anything people want me to follow up.)
All the scores below are for a given feature (glyph or biglyph) occurring in the word immediately following a word ending [ey] or [edy]. They are expressed as z-scores, but I'll set the "interesting" threshold to +/- 2, which has a 95% probability. So most are likely to be valid/worth considering seriously. The data is all Language B, with feature 1 needing to occur at least 100 hundred times in the text, and feature 2 needing to occur at least 200 times in the distribution +/- 8 around feature 1. (These are the same for the data I presented.)
(I've changed [dy] to [edy] to more clearly identify [dy] as a potential suffix. I believe (though it's not important to these patterns) that [ey] + [dy] = [edy]. Hence we're actually looking at the difference caused by the addition of this suffix. Of course, what "suffix" even means here is anybody's guess.)
The scores all show an instance where one pattern is at > +/- 2 and the other is different in some way. I'll try to provide some thoughts, but would welcome others.
End--Start
('ey.', '.d') 0.4
('ey.', '.da') 1.6
('edy.', '.d') -2.9
('edy.', '.da') -2.3
Words ending [edy] are less likely to be following by words starting [d]. Note that if [a] = [y] then part of this might be avoiding [dy.dy] across a space. (Though see below about words ending [dy].)
('ey.', '.k') 2.6
('ey.', '.ka') 3.2
('ey.', '.ke') 0.7
('ey.', '.te') 2.9
('edy.', '.k') -2.6
('edy.', '.ka') -2.8
('edy.', '.ke') -2.4
('edy.', '.te') 0.3
The contrast before words beginning [k] was mentioned in the talk. It's interesting that [te] has the same kind of bias, but not so extreme.
('ey.', '.l') 3.3
('ey.', '.lk') 3.2
('ey.', '.lo') 2.3
('ey.', '.lsh') 2.5
('edy.', '.l') 1.9
('edy.', '.lk') 0.9
('edy.', '.lo') 0.0
('edy.', '.lsh') 0.8
Words beginning [l] are more common after [ey], though after [edy] they're not less common than average, just not so strongly positive.
('ey.', '.ot') -2.1
('edy.', '.ot') 1.4
The pattern is reversed before words beginning [ot]. (Though other words beginning [o] show no difference, so maybe this is just noise?)
('ey.', '.r') 3.0
('ey.', '.ra') 3.2
('edy.', '.r') 1.4
('edy.', '.ra') 0.4
Much stronger preference for [ey] before [r] than for [edy]. But not sure what to make of this.
End--End
('ey.', 'edy.') -2.1
('ey.', 'ey.') 2.2
('edy.', 'edy.') 2.1
('edy.', 'ey.') 0.0
We can see the contrast between [ey] and [edy] before others words ending [edy]. It may be that words ending [edy] cluster, but I'm not sure that would account for after [ey]. Likewise, there's a similar (but less strong) contrast for words ending [ey].
('ey.', 'in.') 2.8
('ey.', 'ain.') 2.5
('ey.', 'iin.') 2.3
('edy.', 'in.') -0.7
('edy.', 'ain.') 0.5
('edy.', 'iin.') -1.1
All kinds of words ending with combination of [i] and [n] prefer after [ey] than [edy].
('ey.', 'o.') -0.2
('edy.', 'o.') -2.3
A smaller contrast with words ending [o].
Thoughts?
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| Solutions |
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Posted by: tavie - 06-08-2024, 01:07 PM - Forum: Curated threads
- No Replies
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Here is a master list of all purported decipherments or readings or language claims for Voynichese that have been discussed on the forum since its start in 2016.
This will be updated every time a new solution or claim is posted to the forum. If you spot any that aren't on the list, please PM me. If you want solutions currently posted outside the forum to be added, please create a new thread for discussion on this forum.
Current total as of 17-06-2025: 62 plus 8 unidentified/unclear theories
- Aramaic (?) by Lorek and Lorek. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Arabic (with Hebrew and Syriac) by Mike P. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Arabic by Fletcher C. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Basque by Gavin G. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Castellan by Alisa G. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- "Cisalpine Celtic" (with Lepontic Syntax" ?! or Medieval Irish?) by Doireann. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Czech by Irena H. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Czech by Elena K. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Czech (Moravian & ?) by Bess A. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- English (Middle) by Geoffrey C. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- English (Middle) by Stellar. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- English (Middle/plant names) by Siv. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- English (numerical) by Mike. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- English (Middle/Galwegian) by Katie T. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Finno-Ugric (with Estonian) by Claudette C. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- French by K. Danielle S. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Germanic (Unknown language, including possibly "Norse") by Eleonora M.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Greek by Ruby N. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Hebrew by Monika Y. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Hebrew by Hannig. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Hebrew (phonetic) by Stephen W-B. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Hebrew by Rebekah. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Italian (?) by Karen O. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Italian (Northern dialect) by Jamie Y. and AI. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Italian (Shorthand) by Gino C. and Agnese F. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Judaeo Greek by Geoffrey C. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Landa Khojki script by Sukhwant S. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin by Julia M. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin (vowelless) by Farmer John. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Latin (abbreviated) by Nicholas G. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin (abbreviated) by Helmut W. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin (phonetic/modified) by MarkWart et al. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin (abbreviated) by Maria Rita L. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin by Patrick L. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin by Paul. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin by Rustandi. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin by Stellar. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Latin (Vulgar) by Tim K et al. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin by Michael H. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Latin by Sygula and Kaluzna. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin (microscopic?) by Wolfgang99. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin (abbreviated) by Ianus van A. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Latin by Jessica L. S. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Latin by amilppc and AI. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Logographic/visual code by Kris. Forum discussion You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Mayan by Ahmet Baris K. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Medieval conlang by Luis C. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Mesoamerican by J. and T. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Morse Code by Stellar. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Nahuatl by Jacinto G. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Pahlavi script by J. Michael H. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Persian by Pardis M. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Polish (Old) by Geoffrey C. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- "Proto Romance" by Cheshire. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- "Senzar" by Andy123 et al. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Slovak by Luis C. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Slovenian by Cvetka. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Turkic (+Aramaic/Persian) by escape. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- Turkic by Ahmet et al. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Turkic by Vfind. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Welsh (Early) by Tim A. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Welsh by Stellar. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Unidentified/unclear language theories:- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Suspected Jewish-Arabic
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Suspected conlang
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Partial decipherment - Arabic?
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. "Ancient language"
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Will not say system yet.
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.". Post does not say system yet.
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Extinct unknown language/ "ancient outsiders"
Nick Pelling also You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. a list of older theories in 2012 (including authorship) but this is not maintained.
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| Brian Roemmele, AI and Rupescissa question |
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Posted by: Barbrey - 06-08-2024, 09:28 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (20)
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I wasn’t sure what category to put this in. I just happened upon an X posting by a Brian Roemmele (AI expert) from March that says he has detracted the Latin from the last page. It says, “the wine multiplies in the bowl”. The phrase is the same as one from John Rupescissa. He says the AI has since located other indications of Rupescissa, and so he’s building an AI around the Voynich and Rupescissa to decipher more. That’s about it. No mention of what his parameters were. To see more, I had to subscribe to this account, so I did but there’s been no news since March.
The thing is, my analysis of the images turned up Rupescissa at every turn. Koen and b1Mw (sp?) can confirm. That’s why I subscribed, but I don’t want to pay the big bucks of $7 a month if this is some kind of a scam!
Does anyone know anything about this???
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| VMS Day 2024: Nymphs Suite |
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Posted by: Lissu - 04-08-2024, 03:49 PM - Forum: Fiction, Comics, Films & Videos, Games & other Media
- Replies (6)
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Hi everyone and happy Voynich Day!
Here's a link to my music piece:
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The suite has three parts:
Part 1: Centaurea
Part 2: Nymphs
Part 3: Moon
I had so much fun with this project! The atmosphere is quite calm and I got inspired by the various sections and illustrations of the manuscript.
I used Sibelius and FL Studio as tools. I really hope you enjoy this and feel free to check out my other songs if you want to. My main genre is electronic but I've composed stuff for live bands too.
Thanks once again for an amazing sunday afternoon!
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| VMS Day 2024: Converting the Voynich MS text to music |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 03-08-2024, 11:14 AM - Forum: Fiction, Comics, Films & Videos, Games & other Media
- Replies (3)
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VMS Day 2024: Converting the Voynich MS text to music
(If there is going to be a dedicated group for this event, this thread may of course be moved there).
Writing on the eve of VMS Day 2024...
As announced, I developed a method to convert the Voynich MS text to music.
This method takes into account numerous known properties of the MS text in order to produce a result that can be listened to without too much discomfort.
I have used this to create one piece of music per page of the MS, for a representative group of pages, and the links to the music will be available from 4 August onward, via this link:
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From 13:30 to 14:00 CEST I will give a short presentation how this music has been generated.
For those who cannot attend, or wish to know more in advance, there is also a paper about this. This does not include some of the basic music theory that will be part of the on-line presentation, and goes into some other details.
It can be found at my academia page, but also simply via You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
This may appear in your browser, but in order for the hypertext links to work, one has to download the pdf file first, and read that copy.
The above link to the music files will be activated at the start of the event.
I will add a short note here at that time.
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| How Different is Each Topic Each Other - Term Frequency Across Topic |
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Posted by: A.Wilmarth - 30-07-2024, 03:45 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (6)
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I haven't seen much on this forum discussing term frequency across topics. Some examples I did find were the "interesting Vwords" series by -JKP-, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and obviously Topic Modeling in the Voynich Manuscript by Sterneck et al.
This could very well be because the results are already common knowledge or because the data is functionally meaningless, but either way at the very least I hope posting this will save someone the potentially wasted effort of doing it themselves.
While the VMS has intrigued me for some time my background is in GIS/cartography, so while data science may be familiar to me, applying them to text and language is not. My amateurish-ness will be very apparent. I apologize in advance. If you have a moment to spare some criticism for my process or for misusing a term, it would be appreciated. While I am naturally inclined to just play with my data and not to post anything, making mistakes and being called out on them the fastest way I know to learn.
My goal was to quantify how difference each topic is from each other, and to build profiles for each 'vord' which could shed light on its potential meanings. For example if a term is used at a much higher frequency in herbal than astrological, we could presume the vord's meaning is more relevant to herbal than astrological. Terms which appears at similar frequency in 2 topics but not in the other 3 might indicate a different meaning than if that vord was equal across all topics, or only highly frequent in one, and so on.
Process
I tried to follow some the same initially methodology as Sterneck et al. I also used the Takahashi EVA transcription as corrected by Zandbergen and Stolti, and sectioned the VMS into 5 topics: 1. herbal, 2. astrological, 3 balneological, 4 pharmaceutical, and 5. starred. Each topic was then considered a separate document.
Where I differed was I assumed full text pages go with the closest illustrations and didn't analyze anything by hand or scribe. These are places where I could improve if this has any value. Additionally, as I was not looking to measure importance, I used a simple term frequency percent. Code: tf = raw count/ total terms in document * 100
Each term's frequency was calculated for per topic and then each topic's frequency was subtracted from each other to get the absolute difference. Afterwards, for visualization purposes, the results were z score normalized; frequency across topic, and differences across all differences within that topics. Differences were then totaled in order to give an overall idea of how "different" each topic is. This process was repeated with a 2 frequency cut-off just to see what impact of unique terms had on the metrics, if any.
RESULTS
Topic Totals
Topic profiles top 40 terms.
Spreadsheet of all terms included as attachment.
TOPIC_FREQUENCY.xlsx (Size: 1.25 MB / Downloads: 16)
Observations
Differences
Assuming contents were indeed related to the illustrations, I had gone into this process expecting herbal to be least like astrological and most like pharmaceutical. While pharmaceutical does to have less difference when compared to herbal I wouldn't say there is strong evidence this is because the content is similar, as herbal seems to be fairly to be similar to nearly all the other topics. This included astrological which surprised me.
I was also not expecting balneological to be so different from everything else, excepting the starred topics. These two were quite similar. Like herbal the starred 'recipes' were similar to all the other topics, but curiously not pharmaceutical. I wonder if there is any evidence here that the starred section originally followed balneological.
For the most part, filtering unique words did not change the overall patterning, just exaggerated it. The one exception is removing the unique words makes astrological appear more similar to pharmaceutical. To me this speaks to the text actually reflecting differing topics rather than gibberish as I would have expected removing unique words would universally make the text more similar.
Observations - Term Patterns
While it might be interesting to look at individual vords, I think in order to save this being a huge block of text I will illustrate some of the potential uses.
As an example here is 3 comparisons. The first two are similar in structure, but by looking at their raw frequencies/histograms alone we might not be able to tell much from them. However by creating a topic frequency profiles we may be able to learn a bit more from these. For instance both cheol and sheol as well as cheey and sheey have a fairly similar profile, where as comparing daiin and ol, these two vord have much different profiles. Could this indicate that that C and S are prefixes which alter the meaning but not significantly? As an analogy, consider the purpose vs re-purpose; both words have similar structure, a related meaning, but one would still be used more often in certain discussions. Of course I don't know, but it may be a different way to look at terms.
"Reading" the VMS
With some effort it may be possible to possible to "read" passages of the VMS by looking at term topic profiles. What I present here is more a proof of concept than anything else. If any of this has any value this process could be improved by better understanding and better parsing of the profiles, as well as potentially by classifying differences from std into high median and low categories.
<f106r.7,+P0> olched.qoiin.ychedy.qokam.sheol.qokor.cheees<$>
This becomes:
vord weighted towards balneological | vord unique to starred | vord weighted towards astrological and away from pharmaceutical | vord weighted away from pharmaceutical | vord weighted towards pharmaceutical and away from herbal | vord weighted against astrological | unique starred word
It might be then possible to assign potential words to these weights based on building profiles for known works that cover similar topics (assuming the contents are even related to the illustrations). So that a program could pick words based on a similarly matching topic difference/frequency profiles. For instance the above could become:
water. stirred. night. running. inside. dirt. abracadabra.
Obviously, I'm pulling these words from thin air to illustrate the concept and I doubt word tables could be built for balenological or starred sections, but maybe for herbal, pharmaceutical, and astrological. It's a stretch for sure.
Improvements?
Assuming any of this has value, I have written some questions I have been asking myself.
Is it important to differentiate by hand or scribe? Should all-text pages be separated into their own category or removed entirely?
Should I build and test a control?
Can I use this to build similar profiles for character n-grams to shed light on if spaces are legit. For example if ok and aiin have the same profile, it might indicate they are part of the same term (okaiin), but if they differ greatly it might indicate they are separate words.
Can I use to word bi-grams and tri-grams to shed more light on their meanings? For example how often does daiin ol show up in herbal vs balneological?
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