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+--- Thread: Why and how the text could be Bavarian (/thread-5312.html)
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian - ReneZ - 04-05-2026
Sorry to chip in here, but 36.4% is 4/11 and 22.2% is 2/9, so the most likely cause is that @JoJo_Jost is using a text with 11 resp. 9 instances, i.e. a different text file.
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian - JoJo_Jost - 04-05-2026
@ tavie
Yes, it was a data entry error. The whole table is inconsistent. A fair amount went wrong in that post. The problem is that the cross-check only verified the raw findings, not the percentages.
It's easy to lose track in the volume of numbers, and when youfinally write it up - building the tables, writing the text - every cell has to be verified.
Honestly, this whole episode has me asking whether posting work-in-progress findings is worth it when errors like this can still slip through despite reasonable care. That raises the question of the cost-benefit ratio. I'll think about it.
I thought sharing the results might help others, maybe spark ideas. That was also the point of the "Work in Progress"framing. But mistakes like this happen, and the responsibility for catching them before publication is mine.
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian - dashstofsk - 04-05-2026
(03-05-2026, 10:29 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.core elements ... bigger picture
The manuscript has the look of being something that was not written in one go. Differences in the writing, trimming, content and style, together with the suspicion that it might have been the effort of more than one person, suggest each section was a separate piece of work written at different times, and was written to an individual standard.
You might have difficulty finding commonality. No big picture. Others have tried and got nowhere.
I really do believe that analysis such as yours would benefit by being applied separately to each of the main work groups. In particular quire 13 is known to have the most consistent writing and if there is any uniformity it would be most apparent there.
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian - dashstofsk - 04-05-2026
Perhaps it might help to list the line last words that appear most frequently by p-start lines, either current line or next line. For language B ( GC text and paragraph text only ) I got
The numbers are small and are probably not high enough to lead to any meaningful conclusion.
Once again, I feel there is nothing special about the p character.
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian - JoJo_Jost - 08-05-2026
So, the intensive investigation of the cores has basically confirmed what I already suspected: the previous cipher approach can't work the way it is.
Still, this is satisfying, because these investigations have given me a very broad foundational understanding of the structure of the VMS.
It's a shame I can't just publish all the interesting results - I'd have to double-check a lot of them (as you've just seen here), and I simply don't have the energy or time for that. Especially since I work with a structured transcription where each individual glyph in a line already carries a lot of information attached to it. Explaining all of that... ugh.
I'm now relatively "sure" it's a hybrid cipher-language system. There's a language underneath. But certain plaintext letters or bigrams are substituted mechanically and rule-based, yet variably (e.g. qo, ch, sh, d, p), while others stay more linguistic - vowels like o, e among others. The variably substituted parts are probably the ones that could be encrypted with something like a disk/wheel. And the word boundaries aren't what they seem; they're actually part of the code - for they have their one rules - which is what makes many of the statistical approaches "difficult"
.Cracking that, if the underlying language were e.g. a Bavarian dialect - very, very difficult...
So I'm stepping out of my previous cipher approach for now; it can't work without the cipher part. If I ever have a more fitting result - no question - I'll show u...
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian - Stefan Wirtz_2 - 08-05-2026
So,
- it‘s not Bavarian/German
- it‘s not a „cipher“.
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian - Stefan Wirtz_2 - 08-05-2026
(04-05-2026, 08:58 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
Once again, I feel there is nothing special about the p character.
That character is not very frequent, but still a „working horse“ — aside from some video sequences where it was deleted from a counting as „not important“.
It would be very special to care more for those languages which show a limited range of word-ending characters, where a vast majority of all words end upon just a handful of letters.
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian - dashstofsk - 08-05-2026
(08-05-2026, 08:16 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.a hybrid cipher-language system ... encrypted with something like a disk/wheel
It would be too burdensome to have to pause the writing after every word in order to consult some code table or spin a disk. It would drive anyone potty.
And also why the strange alphabet? It just adds to the trouble. Encryption could have been made simply with the local language, with no need for an invented script. Also was it really necessary for every word in the manuscript to be encoded, and that none of it could be written in the local language? Even the one word labels of the celestial objects? Did the meaning of every single word have to be hidden from a third party? ~225 pages and ~36000 words all had to be laboriously encoded?
I think you are thinking too hard about the manuscript. The solution is probably more simple.
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian - JoJo_Jost - 08-05-2026
@ stefan I still assume it's Bavarian, based on the typical characteristics of the VMS and the text; if I didn't think that anymore, Iwould agree with Stolfi's chinese
@dashstofsk A simple well known language - unless it's chinese - is, in my opinion, virtually impossible without an additional key, especially when you take all the statistical factors into account. Prove me wrong.
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian - dashstofsk - 08-05-2026
(08-05-2026, 10:46 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Prove me wrong
I'd rather not. As I mentioned to you before [ You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ] if it is your hypothesis you need to provide the evidence for it, and because I have already 'solved' the manuscript to my satisfaction I feel I now need to take a backseat from doing any more heavy analysis work on the manuscript.
But also, I have lately given you some pointers to why I think you might be wrong.