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+--- Forum: Analysis of the text (https://www.voynich.ninja/forum-41.html)
+--- Thread: Switch System (/thread-4482.html)
RE: Switch System - Aga Tentakulus - 21-04-2025
You're not so wrong.
Old spelling (Latin), ‘quum’ later ‘cum’. Entire lexicon available.
This change was around 1400.
If someone has learnt the old school and someone else has learnt the new spelling, there are noticeable differences.
I don't know whether the AI takes the old spelling into account.
But perhaps Lisa could shed some light on this.
RE: Switch System - Bluetoes101 - 21-04-2025
Would that not contradict a carefree flowy style where they do not have to stop and think?
I don't really have any input for spelling of words, but the words are structured and the structure is predictable and to some degree mappable.
The writer may not have been sure if the next letter should be "a" or "y" for example, but once that letter was on the paper the choices for the next character are set.
If they choose "a" the choices are i, n, r, j, m, l
If they choose "y" the choices are t, k, p, f, d, q
If you then add in some knowledge from LAFFU/Slot system etc the choices become even further reduced.
For example lets say it is the 3rd line, in the middle of a paragraph and the choice is "y".
P+F are out. Lets say it is in the middle of a word and we already had a gallows character, now q, k, t are also out.
The next letter can only be "d" (or the word ended).
This is a "perfect world" sort of example and the text sometimes doesn't follow this, 7% (non-conformance) is still a rather large number so it is not exact. But I guess the point is that in my opinion the text was cornered in this example, and much of it is to one degree or another cornered.
The why of it I guess is the interesting part, and on that I have no clue.
RE: Switch System - oshfdk - 21-04-2025
(21-04-2025, 11:26 AM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But I guess the point is that in my opinion the text was cornered in this example, and much of it is to one degree or another cornered.
The why of it I guess is the interesting part, and on that I have no clue.
If the text is a one-to-many cipher (there are several ways of encoding the same plaintext) and a certain ciphertext sequence can have several plaintext interpretations depending on context, sometimes it could be necessary to break the normal flow to avoid ambiguity. It's similar to how natural languages sometimes use diacritics to break diphthongs, like naïve or coöperate.
RE: Switch System - dashstofsk - 21-04-2025
(21-04-2025, 11:26 AM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The writer may not have been sure if the next letter should be "a" or "y" for example, but once that letter was on the paper the choices for the next character are set.
This is one of the big uncertainties about the manuscript, why it is that some characters do not join easily to others. I have found it useful to generate matrices of character affinities that show the frequency of character pairs as a factor of what would be expected if the characters were distributed randomly.
The first one is for Bio B2, the second for Herbal A1, and data was taken from the GC2a-n transliteration.
In particular you will see that cho and ed have greatly different affinities in the two sections. How do you explain that?
RE: Switch System - oshfdk - 21-04-2025
(21-04-2025, 01:40 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In particular you will see that cho and ed have greatly different affinities in the two sections. How do you explain that?
Because in one section there is a lot of chol and in the other a lot of qokeedy? What would happen with character affinity percentages if chol is removed from consideration?
RE: Switch System - dashstofsk - 21-04-2025
(21-04-2025, 01:45 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Because in one section there is a lot of chol and in the other a lot of qokeedy?
It follows. But the real question is why is there a lot of the one in the one section and a lot of the other in the other section. The point I wanted to emphasize is that each of the manuscript sections have language differences and that one way to explore these differences was to look at the character affinities. I thought that the affinity matrices would nicely compliment the work that Bluetoes has done.
As I see it many of the language differences are beyond the bounds of what could be confidently expected due to normal statistical variation.
Here is another nice fact. The character pair eo occurs ~ 3.5 times as frequently in the Pharma A1 section than it does in the Herbal A1 section. Same language A, same hand 1.
RE: Switch System - oshfdk - 21-04-2025
(21-04-2025, 02:23 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But the real question is why is there a lot of the one in the one section and a lot of the other in the other section.
If we work under plaintext assumption, this could be different topics affecting vocabulary. For example, if one part of the manuscript mostly talks about ingredients and preparations, there will be a lot of "cut", "take", "remove", if the other part talks about the stars, there will be a lot of celestial geometry and nothing to cut, take or remove. Hence, overabundance of "ut" and "ov" in the first part.
I'm much more inclined to think that Voynichese as a ciphertext, and the explanation could be as simple as two different keys/mappings/cipher variants.
RE: Switch System - dashstofsk - 21-04-2025
(21-04-2025, 02:41 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If we work under plaintext assumption
That is not really my way of thinking about the manuscript. A plaintext assumption seems implausible to me. I am inclined to believe that a lot of the writing in the manuscript depends on the disposition of the author. For instance, qokeeey. As I see it when the author writes this word he could well instead have written qokeey or qokey. Similarly daiin,dain,dan. Similarly otchey,okchey,oteeey,okeeey,oteey,okeey. Similarly cheols,cheol,chol,Sheol,Shol.
The author seems also to have his favourites. He tends to like to finish his words with a flourish and so l,y,r,n are frequently placed at the end of a word, and not so often mid-word. Likes to start a new page with a bang so p often comes first. Likes the easy-to-repeat strokes i and e. Also strange things seem to happen at the ends of lines ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ). It is human nature to want to be a bit sporting.
So, I suppose what I really want to do is to warn people against believing that any one word has a fixed meaning, and that the same word has the same meaning wherever it appears in the manuscript. I can see that those people who are hoping that the manuscript can be rendered into some meaningful narrative might not like this. Nevertheless I am still happy to read the evidence for the alternative scenarios. Possibly I might be proved wrong.
RE: Switch System - RadioFM - 23-04-2025
As pointed out by sb else in this forum (can't recall who), if the scribe(s) really thought of the text to be asemic and were making it up on the go, it would be very weird to go back and try to squeeze in some extra vords between two lines like so:
It certainly looks as if the scribe paused and went back to add something after having written the line below.
The dairol on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. looks out of place outside of the circle, ruining the symmetry and put there seemingly as if it were something relevant to the contents.
I agree most of the times the scribes seem to be padding or truncating the words just before a drawing intrudes, but there are some instances of a word too long to fit within the remaining whitespace, being written with its last glyphs all cramped or outright ending abruptly.
Of course you could argue that the VMS is actually a copy, and the copyist had no way of knowing whether the original had any meaning or not, and just played it safe and copied everything as instructed, or that it was such a good hoax that they even anticipated us looking at these things as evidence that there's some meaning to it, but the latter seems kind of a stretch to me
RE: Switch System - dashstofsk - 23-04-2025
(23-04-2025, 02:54 AM)RadioFM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.you could argue that the VMS is actually a copy
Somehow I can't see that it is a copy. If a copy then it is highly probable that the diagrams would be different to the originals, placed in a different position, different sizes. The writing would have to avoid the diagrams at different places within the text. New lines would start with a different word. This would be especially so if something like hand 1, with a bigger writing style, was copying work originally done by hand 2. But we do know that first line words and last line words have a statistical anomaly to them. If this was also so in the original then line breaks and collisions with the diagrams would need to be as they were in the original.