| Welcome, Guest |
You have to register before you can post on our site.
|
| Online Users |
There are currently 422 online users.
» 7 Member(s) | 409 Guest(s)
Applebot, Baidu, Bing, Facebook, Google, Yandex, Aga Tentakulus, JoJo_Jost, rikforto
|
| Latest Threads |
Spencer Coll. MS. 65: an ...
Forum: Imagery
Last Post: Pierre Dumont Himself
2 minutes ago
» Replies: 12
» Views: 368
|
Voynich's anatomy
Forum: Imagery
Last Post: Koen G
18 minutes ago
» Replies: 108
» Views: 10,508
|
Assumptions baked into th...
Forum: Physical material
Last Post: Jorge_Stolfi
1 hour ago
» Replies: 37
» Views: 787
|
Why and how the text coul...
Forum: Theories & Solutions
Last Post: JoJo_Jost
1 hour ago
» Replies: 363
» Views: 61,920
|
No text, but a visual cod...
Forum: Theories & Solutions
Last Post: Antonio García Jiménez
1 hour ago
» Replies: 1,911
» Views: 1,319,286
|
[split] Aga Tentakulus' L...
Forum: Analysis of the text
Last Post: Aga Tentakulus
2 hours ago
» Replies: 83
» Views: 34,906
|
EVA "qo" in 15th century ...
Forum: Analysis of the text
Last Post: BessAgritianin
4 hours ago
» Replies: 18
» Views: 2,076
|
German medicinal charm re...
Forum: Marginalia
Last Post: Koen G
Yesterday, 08:14 PM
» Replies: 2
» Views: 135
|
I am not convinced by the...
Forum: Provenance & history
Last Post: proto57
Yesterday, 02:03 PM
» Replies: 53
» Views: 2,425
|
15thc perception on swall...
Forum: Imagery
Last Post: Pierre Dumont Himself
Yesterday, 01:21 PM
» Replies: 605
» Views: 339,616
|
|
|
| Folio, Quire and Section Word Correlation |
|
Posted by: 008348dc760f858fd668476b75fb6f - 28-01-2025, 10:26 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (8)
|
 |
I spent some time with the manuscript over the festive break. I have an idea as to what I think is happening here regarding the text but I'll set that aside for the end. This write-up is a byproduct of the overall investigation, on its own it might be beneficial to people following their own research paths.
The experiment:
Can we establish correlation between folios and sections based on the number of words shared.
The method:
I wrangled a python script that goes through each folio, takes each individual word (above a length of 3 characters) and counts how many times it appears in any other folio. To balance the fact that different folios will have a different number of words I divide the final score by the number of words in the comparison page. The idea is that we are balancing the count against the event opportunity (although I admit this is likely not a *clean* scoring method).
The output & processing:
The output is a big CSV file with the scores for each folio/folio row/column. I imported this into a spreadsheet so that I could do further analysis. I formatted the cells so that they are colored on a gradient based on how much higher they are than the average.
Some advanced warning, this method of displaying the results creates an implicit symmetry between an entry and its counter, basically everything is mirrored across the diagonal and this will create create patterns that don't exist. The output spreadsheet looks like the following:
![[Image: AP1GczNAoeoFK9D-S74M8UNov2z0ridcCM9zV1EO...authuser=0]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AP1GczNAoeoFK9D-S74M8UNov2z0ridcCM9zV1EOelTmYqNJ52XydpZWAPnYrx9Ao-jYVciN-aMWyORGTkW38Snz7ZfGfl_k0VgHZK8UlVTvQdafilYeiRbKGKrekUQDwJvwHaKp3GL2Mr61KjVi6SmYyz7TCg=w1036-h825-s-no?authuser=0)
Starting from the top left corner F1r.
The darker the red color the higher above the average score.
The bordered lines are quires.
The gaps in the column and row headers are the missing folios.
Observations:
We can see very clear correlation between two sections in the bottom right, these are exactly the bathing and recipe sections.
Both the bathing section and the recipe section have very distinct correlation to plants in the second half of the herbal section.
These same plant folios have a strong correlation with the preparation section as well as the bathing and recipe section.
The second clear block is the plant section itself, we see clear correlation between all entries, and perhaps an indication that the last 3 quires of this section are somehow more tightly correlated than the previous 4.
The quires wrap very nicely to these... "islands of correlation", we can see the borders of the quires outlining the sections.
A nice example of this is the "vine" plant that appears in f17v, f96v, f99. It's correlated through theme and word correlation.
How does this help:
It helps us isolate sections to work on, there is a lot of text in the manuscript and reducing the attack surface can help.
We can also use this to validate folio and quire order, for example I've always been confused by location of quire 19 and suspected it belonged somewhere else, but looking at its position on the sheet it shares the same correlations as its neighbors, the bathing section and the recipe section, meaning it likely belongs where it is.
The speculation part:
The current status of the "is it a cipher or not" debate boils down to either "no its the product of a generative method that produces pseudo-language" or "yes but we don't know how or what" or "something else". If this research shows anything it shows that the manuscript text shares a logical correlation to its pictographic themes and even the physical structure (the quires). If this is pseud-language then it follows themes and relations. Also, I don't think these concepts are mutually exclusive, I think you absolutely can use a generative method as an encoding or enciphering mechanism. If I was to state it in a simple way it would be, "you hide a needle in a bunch of haystacks, but you're going to need to manufacture those haystacks". I think the generative mechanism takes words as a seed and produces pseudo-language as an obscured output. I also think there is a sort of pun going on here, it's not just the text being generated, the characters and plants are too, hence why we see so many unrecognisable plants.
The plants are gathered, cut up thrown into a device and turned into something new, like the words.
If I'd say anything, my theory is that a generative mechanism turns a word into many words, perhaps letter by letter. It adds pre/suff-ixes, modifies letters, adds false root etc so that we end up with what we have, a text poor in individual characters and overburdened with words.
I think the generative mechanism is shown in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and is based on a solar quadrant (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
I think the female characters in the center are showing how a word is modified, what that process is.
I think the second outermost circle (containing the repeating pattern of single characters) manages the substitutions.
I think the contents of the generative mechanism is defined by the astal/zodiac section allowing it to be adjusted based on themes.
I think some settings for the mechanism are indicated by the specific female character and their association to a star, or the star present.
I think we have some working notes in the margins of 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. that are further clues to the process.
I think sections sharing an above average correlation are encrypted using the same scheme/settings.
What next:
I'd like to focus on identifying the core word roots and re-scoring everything based on that, I think that would help identify how the prefixes and suffixes are defined based on the mechanism state/settings.
Notes:
I added the missing folios and quires based on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
The solar quadrant was taken from a reference in the interesting academic paper "The Voynich Manuscript as a Manual for the Habsburgs" by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You can get a PDF of the spreadsheet here You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You can get a spreadsheet of the spreadsheet here You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
As is the way with such things, it turns out ReneZ had done this research prior. Head You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.for more correlation goodness.
|
|
|
| Next Voynich Event |
|
Posted by: BessAgritianin - 26-01-2025, 07:55 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (2)
|
|
Hello to all!
Will there be a Voynich-related Conference this year?
As far as I remember- on Malta Conference someone said "Good bye until 2025!"
Or is my memory deceiving me?
br: Vessy
|
|
|
|
| Which plaintext languages to try? |
|
Posted by: oshfdk - 19-01-2025, 02:30 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (48)
|
|
I'd like to test a few potential ciphers to check whether one of them could be it. If Voynichese is a cipher and the manuscript was created in Europe in the 15th century, which languages and which flavo(u)rs of them would be the most likely for the plaintext? Let's assume there is nothing exotic and unexpected about the language, and it's one of the normal languages that manuscripts were written in.
According to ChatGPT, the list of the most popular written languages in the XV century Europe is: Latin, Middle French, Middle High German, Middle English, Various Italian dialects (doesn't sound very helpful), Castilian, Middle Dutch.
Is this list reasonable? What about Greek and Arabic, were they used in parts of Europe at that time?
Could someone suggest a good resource to find samples of each of these language variants, preferably both transcribed and as a photo? I think a short text of about 50 words for each of the languages will be enough, I'm just interested in basic statistics.
As far as I understand, it's quite possible that common abbreviations could have been encoded separately. I've checked the cipher tables from Francesco Tranchedino's list to get some understanding of which abbreviations might get their own codes. (I'm not suggesting these ciphers have anything to do with the Voynich Manuscript, I'm just trying to understand the way the plaintext would be tokenized before encoding.)
It appears that scribal abbreviations were used in the plaintext part of the cipher tables. E.g., I have trouble understanding the parts I circled below, what do these abbreviations stand for? Is there some good list of abbreviations? As far as I have seen, mostly people are referred to Cappelli for the scribal abbreviations, but there are probably hundreds of abbreviations in Cappelli's book, I'm mostly looking for a list of 5-10 most popular ones, like -9 for -us.
|
|
|
|
| Searching for Depictions of Ears in the Cipher Manuscript |
|
Posted by: Dobri - 17-01-2025, 03:57 AM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (4)
|
|
Ears seem (deliberately?) missing from the human heads painted in the cipher manuscript.
Perhaps the artist was deaf from birth to ignore such an essential part of the human anatomy.
Although wearing a coif to cover the ears and the hair was still a common practice at the beginning of the 15th century, there are no coif depictions in the manuscript.
|
|
|
|
| Help me out here |
|
Posted by: GlennM - 15-01-2025, 03:09 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (28)
|
|
The VM was written on 14th century velum, and was picked up by King Philip a couple of hundred years later. If it were a working document for someone who could actually understand it, it became unusable when they died. So, where would someone salt away a useless manuscript for two hundred years only to have someone come along and acquire it because they know their boss, the king likes this kind of stuff. I would think it would have gone into a library. Would a commoner, or anybody but clergy or royalty be afforded the luxury of having something archived for a century or two? Who would even want it? Were encrypted books a thing back then? Puzzles without a key get thrown in the fire.
Forum members have shared numerous illustrations suggesting that the VM was largely copied from other and better works. In the absence of artistic ability, the writer uses nymphs as some sort of all purpose symbolism. If manuscript was for personal use, the rough and ready finish would be understandable, the perfection in the script is just that, too perfect.
I guess what this is getting to is that it seems common that old books can be traced right back to their source. In fact isnt the authorship of a book a status symbol. Then we have the VM, no author, no key, no meaningful link between sections. I think if it was a recipe book, where are the numbers? Sigh!
|
|
|
|
|
