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Posted by: Jon Bold - 02-11-2024, 05:24 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I have been looking at the VM for a few years and I think I have some incremental ideas about the text and some ideas about what the VM is. I am not going to “read it to you”, I would rather show you how to read it. I hope you can recognize and handle the genuine article.
Now, I am going to swim upstream against a lot of popular answers out there and say some things nobody else has said. Starting with: The images of plants, etc. were on the pages before the texts were written. Most of the text has nothing to do with the images.
I think what’s written here is music, a melody line, perhaps in a pentatonic scale, but the lyrics are missing. Could it be liturgical music? Not gregorian chant but perhaps plainsong. If so, we know the words. One of the reasons it is hard for us to believe this is music is how weird and convoluted the Italian system of music is that we use today.
Here is some information the cryptologists should be interested in. There is one short straight line segment in the midst of each of the characters. Most of the characters of the text are distracting serifs, entry swirls, exit swirls etc. the informative part of the character is often nothing more than a horizontal line segment, a vertical line segment, a diagonal line segment, three or four parallel line segments, a cruciform, or a saltier.
Which leaves only about five to nine basic characters, not enough for an alphabet. This is not language. It is a (non-Tironian) shorthand or a code. There are enough characters for a musical scale of one “octave”.
There are other reasons why I think this is a private system for documenting a melody. Notice how often consecutive lines differ by one or very few characters. Typical of hymns. I suspect His Majesty, with a good sense of pitch, was writing the melody down while listening to it.
There are some specific characters with tentative meaning: Starting many lines, there is a common character made of four line segments connected with loopy corners, that means “Four Beats”. Trace this character in the air, starting with a rising line and you will feel like you are a conductor. It is often followed by four characters which I think are notations about those four beats.
Similarly, the character made of three line segments with two loopy top corners means “Three Beats” and is often followed by three characters.
“Two Beats” looks like “three beats” but the upper left loop is missing. It would be followed by two characters.
There are many examples where a beat character is written over the first character in a line. Perhaps the scribe wrote the line and came back to fill in the beat character after counting the beats.
A space between characters might be a repeat or sustain of the preceding character. Or, it might be a natural break between lines of text. But, they seem useful in locating the beginning of a string of characters, where we will find one of the “beat” characters, which tell us how many characters follow.
This makes the character that looks like an (8) and the character that looks like an (o) special characters.
If I am at all correct about any of this, then we should be able to count up the beats in a line of text to know the meter of it, and possibly relate our findings to known examples of very old music, like Veni Veni Emmanuel, or Personent Hodie.
I will venture a guess. The horizontal line is the tonic and the same line with a vertical line above it is the octave. I have no proof. I may substitute values into the other symbols to see if this turns into recognizable music.
On another subject, The ladies. There are multiple sketches of Her majesty receiving a barrel of cool water and a bottle of wine. Fifteenth century gynecology? On the top of page 140 ( left 78) Her Majesty is, isn’t it obvious, cleaning out her fallopian tubes. There is only one lady in all those sketches.
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| Variation among hatchmarks ("curves" and "lines") |
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Posted by: pfeaster - 27-10-2024, 03:51 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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(23-10-2024, 11:26 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What's really important is that, in spite of the similarity between the independent transliterations, a visual inspection of the actual handwriting shows that there are different forms of g. One clearly has a c shape to start with, while the other is more similar to m. The same situation as with Eva-r and Eva-s really.
Another way of expressing this observation would be to say that the flourish which [g] and [m] share in common may be found --
(1) attached to a clear "c shape" or "curve," which makes it a clear [g].
(2) attached to a clear "minim" or "line," which makes it a clear [m].
(3) attached to a stroke that appears to fall somewhere between a "curve" and a "line" -- which could be interpreted as "a [g] that is more similar to an [m]" or "an [m] that is more similar to a [g]" or "a glyph that might be either [g] or [m]."
-- and that the same range of possibilities likewise exists for the flourish which [s] and [r] share in common.
But rather than saying there are "different forms of [g]" and so forth for each of the EVA glyph types involved, it might be more efficient to consider the range of different underlying forms of hatchmarks -- which I'm using here as a generic term for "curves" and "lines" and any other strokes that seem to fall functionally into the same category with them.
One page that can be used to illustrate how much variation there is among hatchmark forms is f6v. It features some nicely typical "curves":
f6v_001.jpg (Size: 5.45 KB / Downloads: 303)
And also some nicely typical "lines":
When there's a sequence of hatchmarks (whether "curves" or "lines"), they often look very similar to each other, suggesting that the scribe wrote them in rapid succession using a similar motion, or at least a motion that "evolved" progressively over the course of the sequence. This is typical.
But in some places on this particular page, "curves" and "lines" seem to converge on another form that doesn't fall clearly into one or the other category. In these examples --
-- the two examples on the left are, I think, reasonably clear as far as EVA glyph identifications go, but the "curve" is rotated counterclockwise so that its upper part points more directly upwards, while the "line" has a conspicuous upturn at the bottom (more conspicuous cases like this can be found elsewhere, but I'm limiting myself to this one page for now). The remaining examples are less clear. If they're "curves," they lack the upper part of the curve -- they look more like [L]. But if they're "lines," the first stroke is oddly vertical -- and in the example at the bottom, it certainly looks as though there's a contrast between these forms (two of them in a row) and the preceding "lines." To my eye, these forms look more like each other than they do like either typical "curves" or typical "lines," even though word morphology would suggest the forms must sometimes be one and sometimes the other.
And what about the final curve or line here? -->
On top of this, we also see some tokens of an alternate form of curve that looks more like [<] than [C] -- a phenomenon also found on some other pages (e.g. f1r):
But then is the first glyph here [r], or is it [s] with the [<] form of curve? Those two alternatives would seem to be fiendishly hard to tell apart, unless from context.
More to follow.
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| Some additional references to Voynich's Jesuit manuscripts |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 26-10-2024, 09:03 AM - Forum: Provenance & history
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For quite some time I have been intrested in the correspondence between Belle Da Costa Greene, famous librarian of the Morgan library in New York, and the art historian Bernard Berenson, who lived in his own Villa near Florence.
The reason for this interest is that Voynich knew Berenson and had shown him some of his 'fine manuscripts'.
Fortunately, I learned from Lisa that this correspondence (the part written by Greene to Berenson) has not only been digitised, it has been fully transcribed and is available online.
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It is truly fascinating to read through this material.
Unfortunately, Greene has destroyed everything that had been sent to her privately, so Berenson's letters are now lost.
I have collected what little I could find about Voynich and his manuscripts You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
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| Positional Probability of EVA letters |
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Posted by: RobGea - 25-10-2024, 01:24 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Probability distribution of EVA letters within a random VMS word
There is a really nice blog post here:
Letter Distributions in the English Language and Their Relations -- Tim Hargreaves
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I didn't do that blog post justice and full description of this method can be found there, but i ended up with this
it's a nice little visualization of where the EVA-letters are likely to be found in a vord.
If we select a random word from the ZL-3a transcription of the vms,
then for the EVA-lettters in that word, these graphs show where in the word that letter is likely to occur.
Preparation:
Transciption file ZL3a-n.txt
ivtt.exe -x7 -a2 -@L ZL3a-n.txt ZL2023_Clean.txt
removed any words with:
apostrophes
? marks
rare chars
single letter words
added the word 'vw' at the end -necessary for R-code to run
Description:
Glyphs have been ordered according to the similarity of their probability distributions.
X-axis : Position of a letter within a word:: Leftmost -> beginning of word, Rightmost -> end of word
Y-axis : Probability:: bottom is 0 (never occurs) -> top is 1 (certain to occur)
Labels : EVA-letter (black), VMS Glyph (gray)
Low frequency glyphs not shown
Underlying grey plots are the exact plots
Colored overlays are the Loess smoothed data ( to reduce noise )
Explanation:
We can see with the group < p, q, c, s > that the plot starts near the top left of the graph and descends quickly as it moves to the right.
Showing these glyphs have a high probability of appearing at the start of a word and have a low Probability at the end of a word.
The roughly opposite effect is observed in the groups < y, r, m, g > and < l > and < n >.
Their plot starts at the bottom left, indicating a low probability of these letters occurring at the beginning of the word.
The plots stay low, denoting their continued low chance of being found as we proceeed further into the word.
Then their plots rise steeply showing that these letters are more likely to be found at the end of a word.
Letters < e > and < i > have an single peak in the middle of the X-axis indicating they are most likely to be found in the middle of a word.
=====================================
A generalized grouping can be described like so:
Code: EVA-letters Most Probable Position
P Q C S mostly word-beginners
A O F D first-two-thirds of a word
K T H mostly mid-word
E I mid-word
Y R M G word-enders
L mostly word-enders
N word-enders
For a detailed study on glyph position see < S.Palmer, Voynich MS glyph position stacks >
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N.B
3 Statistical artefacts are noted:
< EVA-q > the loess smooothing goes awry here, it should follow the black line better.
< EVA-o > the graph shows a small second peak at about 2/3 of the X-axis, this peak is not in the data source.
< EVA-l >, < EVA-n > are colored differently because of the statistic used to generate the colored groups.
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| n-grams while ignoring spaces? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 20-10-2024, 04:46 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I'm getting a lot of comments on my videos (much more than I can answer appropriately), and sometimes they are really good questions. What I like the most is that a lot of people are thinking about the system, rather than coming up with obscure languages.
On my first video about entropy, @stoplight2554 commented:
Quote:wouldnt this suggest some sort of n-gram based system? there has to be some trade off between character length of a text block and encoded characters per length. this sort of has to assume that spaces are to be ignored though..
also, this only works if the ability to predict the next character from the last is not 'continuous' across a section of text. if it reliably fails to predict at a certain interval, then you have your n-gram length. if it never fails to predict the next character, then its too deterministic to express any meaning whatsoever (unless the meaning itself is the repeated pattern)
I like the way they think: the system does suggest n-grams as a possible part of the solution. They also take into account that considering heavy use of n-grams would almost certainly mean that spaces aren't spaces.
Their experiment sounds interesting: you make a long string of characters with spaces removed, and test at which intervals entropy goes up. But would this be testable at all? You'd need to make choices for parsing (e.g. what's your initial treatment of [iin]?). And a single missing or extra character (by scribal error) would throw the system off.
Maybe it's more useful to think in terms of entropy, which is more of an average? So like, how easy is it to predict two characters over when spaces are removed?
I'd also assume that consistent use of, let's say, bigrams, would inflate your alphabet to such an extent that it would become impossible to compare to other texts?
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| Thoughts on [m, g] as [in, ain]? (Stolfi) |
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Posted by: Koen G - 20-10-2024, 04:23 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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It looks like Stolfi leaned towards seeing EVA-m and g as shortened versions of in-clusters. To me this feels right intuitively. But I wonder, has anyone looked into this further? Are there any objections or better solutions?
For reference, here is the section I'm referring to, from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:About m and g
It seems that the letter m is inordinately common at the end of lines, and before interruptions in the text due to intruding figures. The letter m, like the IN groups, is almost always preceded by a or o (862 tokens in 950, 91%). We note also that dam and am are the most common -am words, just as daiin and aiin are the most common -aiin words. Perhaps m is an abbreviation for iin (and/or other IN groups), used where space is tight.
On the other hand, the truth may not be that simple. of the 950 tokens that contain m, 56 (5.8%) are preceded by ai or aii rather than a alone.
The rare letter g, like m, occurs almost exclusively at the end of words (24 tokens out of 27); however, unlike m, it is not preceded by a. We note that g looks like an m, except that the leftmost stroke is rounded like that of an a. Perhaps g is an abbreviation of am?
There are 32 tokens that end in m, but not as am, om, or im. It is possible that these tokens are actually instances of g that were mistakenly transcribed as m --- a fairly common mistake.
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| Curve-Line System - Bluetoes edition |
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Posted by: Bluetoes101 - 17-10-2024, 08:41 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Hi all,
This is not a proposed solution.
I had a slow day at the office and wondered if I could get the Curve-Line System fully working, and I could! .. admittedly it has the "something something too many freedoms" issue and I am working on refining it, but I thought it would be interesting to share something that works anyway.
One possible benefit this system would have (if it can be shown to be accurate) would be defining spaces that are not obvious, as in if the next glyph would break the system it is more likely to be a space than not, the same could be said for non-obvious glyphs either due to them being done a bit scruffy, or damage to the original glyph in one way or another.
How the system works
1. The default state of the vellum is C (not \)
2. \ can't be added without a switch or transition
3. A switch is only activated by a non-switch glyph (aa oo ao oa etc are all treated as a single switch, not 2)
(Glyphs have EVA names)
Switch.
Represented by ">", Function: switches text from C to \ or \ to C
Glyphs - A O
Forward transition.
Represented by "\C", Function: \ followed by C without requiring a switch
Glyphs - FKPT(CH)(SH)DRS
(Gallows + Bench + D R S)
Benched gallows are treated as \\CC
Reverse transition.
Represented by "C\", Function: C followed by \ without requiring a switch
Glyph - Y
All other glyphs are treated as C or \ depending on if they are constructed on top of a C shape or a \ shape.
Word examples
Daiin = \C>\\\
D = \C
a = >
i = \
i = \
n = \
Shol = \C>\
Sh = \C
o = >
l = \
Qokchy = C>\C\CC\
Q = C
o = >
K = \C
ch = \C
y = C\
Otshol = >\C\C>\
O = >
t = \C
sh = \C
o = >
l = \
Line example - I used 26r as I have the MSI image (Line 1).
\C\CC>\CC\ >\C>\\\C C> C\ >\C\C>\C \CC\\C\CCC\ C\\C\CC\CC\ >\\ \C>\C>\C\\CC\CC\
So it works, but as you can see it works because most of the text is made up of transitions (bold) which are more fluid.. freedoms. I will now keep transition status for the gallows glyphs and EVA: D, but set all others to C or \.
CH - CC
SH - CC
R - \
S - C
Y - C
Benched gallows are treated as C\CC
\CCCC>\CC >\C>\\\ C> C >\CCC>\C CCC\CCCCC C\CCCC\CC >\\ CC>\C>CCC\CC\CC
The red text is where the system breaks. It could just be that this is 2 words and not 1, it is a very long word for Voynich text "chofochcphdy" and a unique word (only 1 match using Voynichese website), the break would make this "chofo" "chcphdy". "chofo" has no matches but there is 1 match for "chofol" and the page next to 26r (26v) has "chof" as a unique word, which, well who knows if that means anything but it is there. "chcphdy" has 2 matches, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f85r1, so maybe there is an argument that this is 2 words and not one, which I suppose shows rather nicely what I am working towards.
![[Image: fRGWl8n.png]](https://i.imgur.com/fRGWl8n.png)
There are many more examples of this system not working I spotted while coming up with the framework for something that would work, I have a lot more work to do on this but I am putting it down for tonight and I just wanted to share what I have. I will update the thread as I go.
If you have any thoughts, please let me know 
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| Transcriptions |
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Posted by: Bluetoes101 - 16-10-2024, 11:04 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (28)
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I have been wondering lately if we can, as a group, improve upon the transcriptions currently available online for people to use. The main one would obviously be Takahashi.
I've been reading about several theories regarding the text lately and I noticed a theme within, they are all take bad data on face value and the data they extrapolate from it is flawed. An example is the "Curve/Line theory" - many exceptions are not exceptions, just incorrect transcription. A lot of the conforming examples could be exceptions also, but how will we know without accurate data?
For example if we look at Takahashi transcriptions.
"EN"
16 matches
I would argue (and I believe most would agree) only a couple of the 16 matches are "en".
Most of the problem (with this example specifically) is that the transcription does not take into account that not every "n" is "n" (below), I know some will disagree, but honestly I think if you consider these to be the same glyph you must also consider "s" and "r" the same, in the same way I suppose "d" and "m" must be the same.. and there's probably more examples. They all have the same features. r, m and n start with "\", s, d and g start with "c", but there are many more obvious errors.
![[Image: 6fQQi2V.png]](https://i.imgur.com/6fQQi2V.png)
I'm not savvy in web design, but would it not be fairly simple to set up a version of the voynichese website where people can submit amendments, these could them be reviewed and approved or rejected and then changed or retained? I for one would be willing to help in whatever way I can, and I'm guessing many others would also.
Just to disclaimer this a bit, I am very thankful for the work put in thus far to provide us with what we have, but I just don't think we shouldn't try to improve upon it if we can.
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| Voynich Talk E3: Why your Voynich theory is wrong (pt2) |
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Posted by: Koen G - 07-10-2024, 11:36 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (36)
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I just uploaded a new video to YouTube. It is the second part in a series where I try (try!) to explain to theorists why their substitution cipher doesn't work. In contrast to the last video though, which focused on the well-known and often discussed entropy problem, this one should also offer some food for thought for those familiar with the statistics. The question I explore is this: if we follow the logic of a substitution cipher, and compare Voynichese to the writing systems of natural languages, then how many letters does its alphabet have? People often claim that Voynichese has a large alphabet, but the opposite is true: it' much too small.
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