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| Latest Threads |
On the word "luez" in the...
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AI-generated "Voynich man...
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Would a NEW Voynich Manus...
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| Fakery? |
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Posted by: GlennM - 14-12-2024, 11:50 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (38)
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As much as I'd like the book to be authentic, I understand that if it were, there is nothing of real value to be learned from it. As such, the decoding of pamphlet only satisfies curoisity. None of my commentary is unique, nor profound.
I am skeptical that the VM was created without error in text, nor in art. I find that an impossibility owing to the human thought process. Can we point to a handwritten medieval bible doen without a single error. Other investigators have demonstrated how gibberish can be manufactured with charts, wheel and the like.
Then again. In order to prove fakery, a thing must be readable. If it can not be read, it can not be proven to be fake. This is a comfort to the creator.
It is clear that considerable effort was put into the VM. That said, I have seen examples of forgers putting a ridiculous amount of time to fake a a five dollar bill. As a faked book with the promise of revealing astronomical secrets and well as perhaps a botanical way to make women more pliable, a wealthy patron with occult interests and a weakness for the temptations of the flesh would pay to have it. The fact that it could not be read immediately also plays into the buyer's desire to solve a puzzle to stave off boredom.
Would you think the VM took a week or a month to create? When sold, would it buy food and shelter for a week or month? Certainly, sitting at a table making the VM with a drink at hand beats working in the sun and tilling the land.
If instead, the work was authentic, then its author was interested in women's health, but constrained by the mores of the times. That would then point to an educated clergyman who was also practicing alchemical and astrological gynecology..
Look to history for a humanitarian clerical healer.
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| Unpainted version of VMS |
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Posted by: oshfdk - 13-12-2024, 03:58 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (59)
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I've uploaded a version of VMS images with paint subdued by a simple linear regression algorithm, using the TIFF images published by Beinecke (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University). The idea was to boost the ink to get some understanding of what the manuscript looked like before the painting.
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Things to consider, non technical: the algorithm is very unlikely to introduce shapes that are not present in some way or other in the original images of the manuscript. If there is a line in the processed images, it's likely it was in the original images too. Not necessarily this line was made with ink though.
The opposite is not true: the algorithm can (and in many cases does) fail to detect quite obvious ink lines under paint.
I used a single model to process all the image files, so it's natural that for some of them the result is much better than for the others.
You can use/modify/distribute these images in whatever way you like. Probably you should credit Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University for the original images. You can credit me as 'oshfdk' (all lowercase) if you wish, but this is not necessary.
More technical details:
The processing is local and based on a diamond shaped 5x5 px kernel, that looks like this:
**2**
*212*
21012
*212*
**2**
0 is the pixel the class (ink, paint, vellum) of which the algorithm is trying to identify. The model receives the color information for pixel 0, the average color of all pixels in group 1 and the average color of all pixels in group 2. Only the color information from these 13 pixels is used by the model for each output pixel. Averaging the color values of pixels in groups 1 and 2 allowed me to provide the model with some immediate context without giving it any spacial or directional information. Prior to averaging, the color information was augmented by combining RGB and HSV channels and adding second order polynomials (a^2 for each channel and ab for each pair of channels), resulting in 27 values per group and 81 input values in total per single output pixel. The model itself is a simple linear regression, the training data included about 50000 marked pixels from 8 folios: 1r, 1v, 2r, 4v, 7r, 25r, 67r, 83v (I started from 1v and then was adding folios for which model couldn't separate colors well enough).
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| Color Deconvolution / "Depainting" |
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Posted by: evandrunen - 04-12-2024, 06:50 PM - Forum: Physical material
- Replies (33)
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I've been toying with ways to "depaint" the manuscript. The most recent work I can find is Landini's colour deconvolution from back in the early 2000s. I wanted to check if anyone knew of newer developments? Also, is there a significant set of "depainted" images anywhere? I can only find fragments of Landini's image results, and some cruder image work done by Pelling (focused on recovering painted-over text).
Thanks!
Eric
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Eastern Astrology present in VMS |
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Posted by: argo2001 - 28-11-2024, 02:25 PM - Forum: Astrology & Astronomy
- Replies (23)
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I consider the astrological part of the book the most important, because beside the plants (which are hardly identifiable) our stars and constellations do not change, and therefore it is the only part of VMS that can be connected to our real world.
Few months back I got myself to study a bit, and found that Chinese have a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. system. These Mansions reflect the movement of the moon in a lunar month (28 days) where each day corresponds with a constellation.
The Chinese lunar calendar is separated into quadrants - Dragon(East), Turtle/Snake(North), Tiger(West) and Bird(East). The south is usually on top.
Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Indians and Arabs utilise similar concept.
The 28-Mansions System lunar appears to be present on page f68r3. I saw there is an agreement that f68r3 features the moon in the middle.
What's more interesting is this rendition of the Mansion System from time of Yuan dynasty 1271-1368. Marco Polo served Yuan dynasty around 1280.
What's important, all lunar mansion systems - be it Arabic, Chinese or Indian - do include Pleiades as one of the mansions. The symbol in Chinese is "昴" is 16th lunar mansion, under Tiger(west).
In this image, I located 昴 on the right and adjusted it to align with the European north-up perspective. Conveniently, the Pleiades constellation in the VMS corresponds to the chart.
edit: changed title from "Chinese Astrology present in VMS" to "Eastern Astrology present in VMS"
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| A family of grammars for Voynichese |
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Posted by: Mauro - 27-11-2024, 04:19 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (128)
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Hello everybody. I’m a new member, an Italian with a background in electronics engineering (industrial automation sector, now happily retired). I have dabbled from time to time into the Voynich manuscript, expecially from the point of view of statistics and word structure, without ever finding anything useful to report.
However, I have recently developed a word grammar or, better, a family of grammars, which I would like to share, together with a comparison with the grammars proposed by ThomasCoon, Zattera and Stolfi. Unfortunately, I have not found a way to format the presentation in a good way to display on the forum, so I have uploaded the .pdf file on Google Drive at this link (sorry for the inconvenience):
The contents of the (short) presentation are:
1) INTRODUCTION: mostly concerned in defining how the evaluation of the grammars is made.
2) “BASIC” GRAMMAR: the simplest one, which makes clear how the underlying structure works. It finds 48.7-50.58% of the Voynichese words (depending on the variant of the grammar), with a better efficiency than ThomasCoon and Zattera (efficiency = number of Voynich words found / total words which the grammar can possibly generate).
3) “COMPACT” GRAMMAR: tweaked for efficiency, it’s 3-6 times better than the BASIC grammar, with a small decrease in the words found.
4) “EXTENDED” GRAMMAR: tweaked for coverage, it finds 88.45% of the Voynichese words, while at the same time being simple and reasonably efficient (and the coverage rises to 92.79% if words with ‘rare’ characters such as ‘g’ or ‘v’ etc., which are not used by the grammar, are excluded).
5) APPENDIX: a final consideration and a resume of the data.
Apologizing in advance for any mistakes I may have made, I hope you’ll find it interesting, and I will gladly read any answer and comments from the community.
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| Rosettes Page: In The Beginning |
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Posted by: Dana Scott - 23-11-2024, 11:19 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (2)
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I believe that the lower left rosette on the 9-folio foldout page
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is a depiction of God's creation of the "heaven[s] and the earth".
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Genesis 1
King James Version
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
This volvelle is shown in Hebrew Cosmology:
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Notice the column shapes as drawn in the white areas separated by the oceans and seas:
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God's commands from above heaven emanate from the cloud burst located to the upper right of the volvelle:
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At the lower left corner of the volvelle is a depiction of the clock which started at the "beginning of time":
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The canopy in the middle of the volvelle includes the first set of stars seen in the universe:
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Perhaps the "words" listed here depict the Days of Creation including the Sabbath?
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Some statistics and analysis regarding VMS (words & letters) |
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Posted by: argo2001 - 23-11-2024, 01:02 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (12)
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So I did some frequency analysis of the text. I'm still processing the most of it, but I wanted to share some stats I got. It's possible some of these data have been posted or done before by someone else, but I couldn't find it.
The data might not be 100% precise due to transcription errors. I used transcription from Landini-Stolfi. I have limited dataset of old Latin and English (only around 5000 words)
Total letters (excluding spaces): 194 771
Total words: 37 852
My entropy calculations of text based on words:
Voynich - 10.5957 bits
English - 7.9068 bits
Old Latin - 9.8516 bits
My entropy calculations of text based on letters:
Voynich - 3.8689 bits
English - 4.1317 bits
Old Latin - 4.0166 bits
- Vast majority of words are unique = 6126 (70,54%) of words appears only once. 941 (10,84%) appear twice, and 382 (4,40%) thrice. That's 85% of words that are unique. These unique words make up 24,18% of the entire text. Truly unique words (they appear once) make up 16,18% of the entire text.
- The word that appears the most (as a standalone) is "daiin" - 820 times (2,17%) Here are some data regarding "daiin":
(the top row lists if the string "daiin" appears as a standalone word, or if it's a part of a different word. If it's part of a different word, I list if it has initial, medial or final position.
the bottom row lists what is the most common letter that precedes/follows it in all cases. If the word is a standalone, I list what words commonly precede/follow it - ex. "chol daiin")
- The second word that appears the most (as a standalone) is "ol" - 504 times (1,33%) - but it appears over 5000 times as a part of a word.
- The word frequency in Voynichese (light blue), 15th Century Latin (Yellow), Modern English (dark blue/purple). I believe we already knew that it resembles Zipfs Law, but I'll show it anyway. Note: I don't have sufficient data to feed my algorithm regarding other languages, that's why English and Latin are so low. My Voynich algorithm worked with 37852 words, English and Latin with around 5000 words. I'd be happy if someone provided me with some old relevant texts that I could feed into the algorithm. Let me know!
Independently:
The most common combinations of words that appear in the text are:
"or aiin" - 51 times
"s aiin" - 44 times
"ar aiin" - 32 times
"chol daiin" - 30 times
"chol chol" - 21 times
"qokeedy qokeedy" - 20 times
(Some) of the longest strings that appear multiple times in the text are:
"ol shedy qokedy qokeedy" - 2 times
"qokeedy qotedy qokeedy" - 2 times
"qokedy qokeedy qokeedy" - 2 times
"qokedy qokedy qokedy" - 3 times
"sheedy qokedy chedy" - 3 times
"chol daiin chkaiin" - 2 times
Regarding individual letters/symbols:
Frequency analysis of all letters:
Analysis of letters - do they appear standalone, initial, medial or as final?
So yeah, these are some of my results - if you have request or are interested in more, let me know.
If you have any questions, ask.
Feel free to draw some of your conclusions in the comments.
Please, if you have some digitalized transcripts of original 15th century texts or similar (any language), share them with me. 
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