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| Line Studies |
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Posted by: HermesRevived - 02-05-2024, 05:35 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (6)
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These posts are probably better put as a thread here.
Lines are more interesting than words. The observation that they may act as "functional units" in themselves makes them especially worthy of investigation.
This is the first in a series of proposed LINE STUDIES where I will examine discrete lines of text. The first is line 5 from f25r. The line in question is:
qotcheaiin.dchain.cthain.daiin.daiin.cthain.qotaiin-
It is a noteworthy line in which every word has the same suffix.
The study can be found here:
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R.B.
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| New book by Ianus van Altrideicktus |
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Posted by: degaskell - 30-04-2024, 11:14 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (3)
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I recently received an email advertisement for a new self-published book by Ianus van Altrideicktus claiming a Voynich solution (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). I have not read the actual book, but the synopsis is not particularly promising: yet another abbreviated-Latin solution based on "multiple glyph renderings", yielding text fragments but no published complete translation. Still, worthy of at least a mention on this forum.
Ianus van Altrideicktus Wrote:This book invites the reader on an adventurous journey into an uncharted realm of cryptology history through the decryption of the Holy Grail of codebreakers, the Voynich manuscript. The solution invokes multiple glyph renderings including both letters and abbreviations based on medieval Latin writing traditions. This way, the Voynich text constitutes a mixed polyphonic and shorthand cipher. Based on some insightful analogies from materials science and quantum mechanics, a context-propagation-based approach was developed toward decryption. With the help of this method, numerous Voynich sentences and text segments were deciphered. These are presented through three chapters in the book, and the first Voynich-Latin vocabulary is also provided therein. These discoveries explain its puzzling statistical-linguistic features and also why the Voynich code resisted the previous decryption attempts. Furthermore, the solutions and interpretations included in the book constructively resolve the apparent controversies that emerged during the century-long history of Voynich research.
In search of the Voynich author(s), the book also presents the discovery and decryption of some concealed ciphers in Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (also providing explicit evidence of his authorship), Johannes Trithemius’ Steganographia, and John Dee’s Enochian texts. Some of these non-local, polysemic ciphers turned out to be related to each other. Through the shocking decrypted contents, the reader can also get acquainted with the alchemical and black magical pursuits of cryptographer giants Leon Battista Alberti, Johannes Trithemius, and John Dee, who are also identified as the most likely contributors to the Voynich manuscript.
Besides, the book offers a solution to a concealed riddle of painter Jan van Eyck, a contemporary of Alberti. This decrypted content appears pivotal in the understanding of the painter’s clandestine pursuits. The presented multidisciplinary studies, along with numerous contemplative photographs, reflect the dualistic, magic-filled world of these Renaissance cryptographer magi. This book can serve as a reference work for amateur and professional cryptologists, historical linguists, scholars, art historians, and can certainly count on the interest of the general public as well.
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| Your video ideas, suggestions, requests... |
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Posted by: Koen G - 29-04-2024, 04:32 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (17)
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As you may have noticed, I started making videos again. I decided to call the series "Voynich talk", both because it describes the contents well, and as a nod to this (sub)forum. I have a few ideas for videos I'd like to make, but I'm also curious for your requests and ideas. These could be:
- Interviews; I stepped away from an "interviews only" structure, but of course they will still be part of the series. Getting the views of specialists who usually don't post on forums remains one of the goals. It will probably help if I make some decent videos first, so they know I'm not crazy.
- A subject you'd like to see/hear someone explain or talk about. For example, when Rene's new language classification system is on point, I'd like to talk to him again about that.
- Anyone from the forum or outside who would like to tell me about a Voynich-related or adjacent topic they are passionate about, new research they are conducting...
- Some other form, like a debate, a review...
- ...
So really anything you can think of that would make a good video.
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| Axial Symmetry in Lines |
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Posted by: HermesRevived - 28-04-2024, 11:30 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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At least one of the patterns we find in lines of Voynich text is axial symmetry.
It is easy to detect. Counting words, we find the midpoint of the line and then look for any symmetries either side of that axis, such symmetries being palindromic.
The method is suggested by the (notable) red-line text on f67r. In EVA:
sshey syshees qeykeey ykchey ykchey qokeochy oaiin okalar ol??
The line displays pronounced axial symmetry, and while the rubricated text is much discussed I do not know of any studies drawing attention to this.
I discuss it on my blog here:
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In short, the central words are:
qeykeey ykchey --- ykchey qokeochy
And either side of that we find a contrast between [s] words and [o] words, thus:
sshey syshees
qeykeey ykchey
ykchey qokeochy
oaiin okalar ol??
Alerted by this important line of text, we then investigate whether this phenomenon is widespread.
Turning to the very first line of text in the manuscript, we find another case of it.
fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cthres.y.kor.sholdy-
In the case of the red text the axis (midpoint) of the line displays a duplication of the word [ykchey]. On this first line of text, at the midpoint we find two similar words: [shol] and [shory].
It is hard to detect any further symmetries, but there are some important ones.
[ykal] and [y.kor] offer a symmetry involving the gallows [k].
Then we notice the same symmetry in the glyph [t] – there is a [t] glyph either side of the axis.
Thus we have this palindromic pattern:
K T shol – shory T K
Moreover, note how the glyph [a] is only found on the left side of the axis (i.e. the first half of the line):
fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.
shol.shory.
cthres.y.kor.sholdy-
This is the same type of pattern that we find in the red text line, albeit less conspicuous.
Symmetries of all sorts might arise by chance, of course, but the red text on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. suggests constructed patterns. (Arguably, as some speculate, this red text might be some sort of key.)
* * *
Another example:
Line 4 from f30v:
chotchol.daiin.cthol.doiin.daiin.chokeor.dal.chtoithy-
Eight words. The axis is after [doiin].
Here we find the symmetry of [doiin] and [daiin].
From this point another pattern emerges. The initial glyphs of words run in alternations of [ch] and [d]:
chotchol.daiin.cthol.doiin.
daiin.chokeor.dal.chtoithy-
In this case there is no obvious pattern to the gallows glyphs, but there is to word initial glyphs. Thus:
CH D CH DOIIN – DAIIN CH D CH
* * *
Another example of axial symmetry of initial glyphs:
<f94v.P.5;H>
tedain.chedy.qokshd.okchdy.
qokeal.chorchor.tchor.am-
Axial Symmetry:
t ch q o q ch t
Notice here, though, that the final word [am] does not participate. By observation, it seems that in some cases it is necessary to overlook the final word (or particle) in order to locate the actual central point of symmetry.
* * *
Some cases can be found of lines that are starkly palindromic such as this short line:
<f35r.P.6;H>
schaiin.char.chan.daiin-
schaiin.char. ---- chan.daiin-
Here is another simple case:
<f35v.P.13;H>
ol.char.od.ar.chear
ol.char.
od.
ar.chear
As with the red text line, the symmetry here is more obvious in Voynich script because it involves certain visual elements. That is, there is symmetry of units that look the same or similar.
* * *
Another case, this time from the B Text:
<f103r.P.29;H>
qokechchy.shokeey.qochey.qokeey.
chal.chedy=
We break this up as:
qokechchy.
shokeey.
qochey.
qokeey.
chal.chedy
The symmetry here involves the doubled [ch] in the first word:
ch-ch - shokeey -- qochey -- qokeey - ch - ch
* * *
Here is a line from 58v that displays axial symmetry in the central words:
<f58v.P2.36;H>
olkeey.okar.ar.choky.otair.otol.chokey.
cheeky.dalar-
choky.otair.--- otol.chokey.
Before and after this we find words suggesting serial repetition:
olkeey.okar.ar
cheeky dalar
In any case, once again we see the usefulness of locating the centre of the line for exposing structural symmetries.
* * *
Here is a strongly palindromic formation, conspicuous because of two instances of triple [eee] at the midline.
<f16r.P2.6;H>
oshaiin.dyky.oeees.deeeod.aiin.dtoaiin-
The symmetry is:
AIIN - EEE - EEE - AIIN
* * *
These are enough examples to demonstrate the phenomenon. Assuredly, many lines show no much patterns, but many do, including the red text on 67r. Can we demonstrate deliberate patterns beyond what might arise accidentally, evidence of some orgasnisational process?
I hope to provoke some discussion of LINES from this viewpoint - axial symmetry (palindromic configurations, mirroring) and the midline point, and the possibility that at least some lines are organised on a central axis.
In many lines it seems there are a series of variants, or different ways of writing the same word: in some cases this process might be organised around a central pivot.
R.B.
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| Some contrarian views on transcription |
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Posted by: kckluge - 28-04-2024, 07:35 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (3)
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* Contrarian view #1: Don't bother sweating the "weirdos".
Having built scripts to convert both the L-Z EVA-based transcription and the v101 transcription to the Currier alphabet, my recollection is that the fraction of glyphs for which there is not an unambiguous Currier equivalent (at least with regard to the running text in the initial herbal quires and the bio section) is roughly half a percent. I'll double check, but I'm pretty sure that's right (which is not to say that the transcriptions agree with each other at that level). That means "basic EVA"/Currier/just the vanilla ASCII bits of v101 captures roughly 199 out of every 200 glyphs. That should be good enough to read the text (if there is a text to read) -- and if it's not, then I would argue that there's no point in worrying about it.
To be clear, this is a pragmatic claim not a theoretical one. If the question is "is it possible that reading the text requires capturing every nuance of every 'weirdo' in the text?", then I have to agree that yes, abstractly it is possible. The text could be generated in some way that has some kind of state such that unless we capture all the weirdos we'll fail in trying to read it. I don't think I've ever seen anyone make a compelling case that the bulk statistics of the text make that likely, but it's possible.
Pragmatically, if that's the case then I think that without some additional side channel of information -- finding a "bilingual" document enabling a known plaintext attack, for instance -- we might as well throw in the towel. Which makes investing large amounts of effort in encoding "weirdos" (as opposed to just marking them with something like the Currier alphabet's '*' "here be a dragon" character) an unproductive use of time. Which means "basic EVA"/Currier/just the vanilla ASCII bits of v101 should be good enough.
That's not the same thing as saying that there isn't room for argument over whether "basic EVA" (for instance) is capturing the right equivalence classes of groups of ink strokes. I've seen people claim that whether an 'a' is closed at the top or not matters, for example -- but that's a different issue.
* Contrarian view #2: For the sake of all that's good and bright and beautiful in the universe, can we please, please, please stop using EVA?
While I have never loathed EVA with the blazing white-hot passionate hatred that Glen Claston did (and anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating can go read his Voynich mailing list remarks on the subject), I just don't see the argument for "why EVA?". Granting the premise that there is value in an "analytic" transcription that is neutral about how to read the ligatured gallows or word-final i*<x> sequences, I fail to see why EVA is that transcription -- and in particular, I see no reason to prefer it to Frogguy (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.):
1) I have never understood the virtue of prioritizing making the transcription pronounceable over visual resemblance to the script. I mean, sure, a 'd' kind of looks like an '8' with the upper loop squished, and a 'y' kind of looks like a '9' without a closed top loop, and a 'q' kind of looks like a '4' written by someone who hates corners, but...why? According to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it's to help make common words easy to recognize and remember. I suppose this is one of those "your mileage may vary" things.
2) In fact, the pronounceability of EVA has had the unfortunate effect of a non-trivial number of naive newcomers to MS 408 thinking there is actual significance to the phonetic values in the EVA transcription scheme. I realize that the people behind EVA didn't intend that to be the case, and are explicit in various places in making clear it isn't, but if someone just grabs a transcription file without "reading the manual" that doesn't help.
3) The clear advantage of Frogguy is that the learning curve is truly minimal. The gallows, for example, are 'lp', 'qp', 'lj', and 'qj' -- and anyone who has seen the actual text should immediately grok which is which...
4) As Rene says on the page referenced above, "It is very important to point out that Eva is not attempting to identify semantic units in the text. It simply represents in an electronic form the shapes that are seen in the MS. It is left to a later step by analysts to decide which combinations should be seen as units." If you're going to have to transform the transcription to do meaningful analysis anyways, why not do it from something that maximizes the fluency of transcription with a lower learning curve (and probably lower transcription error rate)?
I think that's probably enough of me being a curmudgeon for the evening...
Karl
(PS, coming soon -- the Midsomer Murders MS 408-themed fanfic you never realized you needed. When a visitor researching a possible connection between Midsomer and the mysterious Voynich manuscript is found murdered at a Voynich-inspired spa & herbal treatment center, Winter and Barnaby have to decode the killer's motive before there are more deaths. How many more victims will die before they succeed in...Deciphering Murder?)
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| Why we can't read it and Michael Coe's "Five Pillars of Decipherment" |
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Posted by: kckluge - 27-04-2024, 10:11 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (5)
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A while back I can across a very interesting blog post by a linguist (Peter Bakker, an expert on creole languages) offering thoughts on the MS 408 text from a linguistic perspective (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -- the would-be decipherer he refuses to name is clearly Cheshire...). His conclusion is that "If it would have been a real language, in a rational and regular writing system, experts would have figured it out by now."
While I don't think Michael Coe has ever commented on the Voynich text, he's someone who has experience as a key player in the decipherment of the Mayan script. As a result, he has a good understanding of the historical prerequisites for successful decipherments of unreadable scripts, which he has articulated in a number of places as the "Five Pillars of Decipherment" (see, for instance, 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.; Zender gives a slightly revised list of the pillars in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Here are the five pillars (quoted from Coe's paper on the Indus script):
"1 A large and well-published database: there should be many texts, and most of these should encode complete sentences.
"2 A known language which is encoded by the script, preferably reconstructed in phonology, grammar, and syntax to the period in which the script was in use.
"3 One or more bilingual texts, one member of which is in an already deciphered or otherwise readable script.
"4 A well-understood cultural context to aid in the understanding and reading of the texts.
"5 If the script is logographic or logo-syllabic, there should be accompanying pictorial references (as there are in Egyptian and Classic Maya) to apply to the texts.
"Even texts written in an alphabetic system can be difficult to understand if some of these conditions are not met; consider Etruscan, which violates no. 2 in this list - although we can read Etruscan inscriptions (since the alphabet is very similar to the Greek), they are not readily intelligible.[....]"
Looking at the "pillars" in the context of the Voynich mss.:
Pillar #1 (large database): While there is only one "text", the total length of the manuscript text is fairly large. If there is a meaningful underlying text, it is unclear that the entire codex is in a single natural language (or cipher system/key as the case may be) -- as Bowern & Lindemann observe (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), "Although there is some overlap, the most common vocabulary items of Voynich A and Voynich B are substantially different. While the words in both languages are built from the same three-field structure, they do not clearly correspond to each other. They might be the result of different encoding processes, or they might represent different underlying natural languages." Even so, given the volume of text just the Herbal A dialect pages or the Bio B pages would seem to provide ample material to work with.
Pillar #2 (known language): What Coe means here isn't simply that the underlying language is attested somewhere. He's talking about the way the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics leveraged the assumption that non-Egyptian names were transcriptions of Greek names using the phonetic values of the characters, and that the texts as a whole were in a language closely related to Coptic; or the way the decipherment of Linear B leveraged the assumption that the underlying language was an early form of Greek; or the way the decipherment of the Mayan script leveraged the assumption that the underlying language was closely related to the Conquest-era spoken Mayan language. It would be fair to say there is no consensus regarding any underlying natural language (whether enciphered or not).
Pillar #3 (bilingual texts): Yeah...we don't have that. 'Nuf said.
Pillar #4 (cultural context): Unfortunately, we don't have much certainty about that. The bulk of the analysis of the imagery that has been done has focused (understandably in light of Pillar #5) on trying to identify the plant images; there has been much more limited published art historical analysis of the other imagery. Diane O'Donovan has written extensively on the subject, and hopefully will follow through on her current plan to submit several papers describing her views for publication -- as someone who isn't an art historian by training, I'd like to see other professional art historians engage with her views on the subject. Others such as Koen Gheuens have mapped specific motifs over a more limited European range. It's very unfortunate that we don't have any visibility into the content of Martina Pippal's recent course on the subject at the University of Vienna.
Pillar #5 (accompanying pictorial references): In principle, we have those. The plants would seem to offer the most likely leverage point -- efforts to identify the plant drawings go back to Ethel Voynich and Theodore Petersen; Jorge Stolfi put forward an argument that the first word of the herbal pages was likely the plant name (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Unfortunately, efforts to use the plant drawings as cribs haven't worked (at least partly because many of the plant identifications are uncertain or contested).
So, in summary -- yes on Pillar #1, no on Pillars #2 & #3, unclear at best on Pillar #4, and in principle a yes on Pillar #5. Looked at through the lens of Coe's pillars it's not all that surprising the text (if there is one) hasn't been read.
Karl
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| Almanacs: Ptolemy's Phases |
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Posted by: HermesRevived - 27-04-2024, 03:33 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (3)
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New posts at Lingua Nympharum, now pursuing astrological and astro-meteorological themes, including this post concerning solar/stellar 'phases' and almanacs as a model:
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| New Paper: Subtle Signs of Scribal Intent... |
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Posted by: asteckley - 26-04-2024, 09:48 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (15)
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Our recent paper, “Subtle Signs of Scribal Intent in the Voynich Manuscript” may be of interest to those of you analyzing the Voynich text for its possible underlying language and meaning.
The preprint version can be found on ArXiv: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Abstract:
“This study explores the cryptic Voynich Manuscript, by looking for subtle signs of scribal intent hidden in overlooked features of the “Voynichese” script. The findings indicate that distributions of tokens within paragraphs vary significantly based on positions defined not only by elements intrinsic to the script such as paragraph and line boundaries but also by extrinsic elements, namely the hand-drawn illustrations of plants.”
The paper is a bit technical, so here is a summary of the more interesting results: - Certain word tokens exhibit a propensity to occur –or to be avoided– in certain positions such as the top line of paragraphs or at the beginning or ends of lines. That is not too surprising as it’s been observed to some extent before.
- The more surprising find is that there is also a propensity for certain word tokens to occur immediately before, or immediately after, the hand drawn plant illustrations.
The propensities were analyzed in detail to ensure the statistical significance.
A reference catalog of word tokens with propensities was compiled. Only a couple of the tables could be included in the paper due space limitations, so below are a few more of them.
The whole catalog of tables is included in the Supplemental Online Material at:
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Note that the entire analysis was restricted to the portion of the manuscript believed to be written by a single scribe (Scribe 1 as identified by Lisa Fagin-Davis).
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![[Image: image-19.png]](https://herculeaf.files.wordpress.com/2024/04/image-19.png)
