Analysis of patterns at the very start and end of lines, per line type

Analysis of patterns at the very start and end of lines, per line type - Printable Version

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RE: Analysis of patterns at the very start and end of lines, per line type - Jorge_Stolfi - 17-09-2025

(16-09-2025, 02:48 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don’t like throwing out baseless theories or overcomplicating things, but I can’t help noticing that the characters most common at the beginnings of lines (except the first lines of paragraphs) are also the ones that most resemble Arabic numerals in the Voynich.

So the first letter could be a key to use in encryption/decryption algorithm for the rest of the line? Like the shift of a Caesar cipher, or the column of a table of more arbitrary encryption substitution ciphers?

I can imagine someone in the 1400s inventing such a scheme.

One could test that theory by separating all lines into subsets based on their first glyph, computing the word frequency distribution of each subset (excluding the first word of each line) and comparing those distributions.

However, there is the problem that any position-dependent cipher would almost surely encode each occurrence of the same word type as two or more distinct words. That would flatten out the frequency x rank plot ("Zipf plot") at the high frequency end -- which does not seem to be the case.

(And, just for the record, I stil believe that the VMS is not encrypted at all.)

All the best, --jorge

RE: Analysis of patterns at the very start and end of lines, per line type - oaken - 17-09-2025

(16-09-2025, 02:48 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don’t like throwing out baseless theories or overcomplicating things, but I can’t help noticing that the characters most common at the beginnings of lines (except the first lines of paragraphs) are also the ones that most resemble Arabic numerals in the Voynich.

So the first letter could be a key to use in encryption/decryption algorithm for the rest of the line? Like the shift of a Caesar cipher, or the column of a table of more arbitrary encryption substitution ciphers?
[/quote]

I can't remember who posted it but in another recent thread, a user posted a page where it appeared some of the line-start letters of some lines seemed to have been written around existing letters (something I understand earlier researchers have rejected on the whole for the vms), but I did notice if I covered the rest of the lines it looked like a column of Arabic numerals to my untrained modern eyes.

(17-09-2025, 02:27 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.However, there is the problem that any position-dependent cipher would almost surely encode each occurrence of the same word type as two or more distinct words. That would flatten out the frequency x rank plot ("Zipf plot") at the high frequency end -- which does not seem to be the case.

Do you think it would make this stat more like vms if these line start numbers somehow functioned with the also anomalous paragraph start lines to form a key for the paragraph?
(I understand such a solution has implications for the reading of labelese, and I tend to agree that the vms seems an unlikely cypher in the traditional sense, although cyphering know-how could have been part of the generation process).

RE: Analysis of patterns at the very start and end of lines, per line type - quimqu - 17-09-2025

(17-09-2025, 02:27 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One could test that theory by separating all lines into subsets based on their first glyph, computing the word frequency distribution of each subset (excluding the first word of each line) and comparing those distributions.

I did a fast check. The cosine similarity plot suggests that the first character of a line doesn’t create a separate "language" within the manuscript. It may nudge the line in a certain direction, but overall the vocabulary quickly falls back into the same general pattern as the rest of the text.

[Image: gdaUY5O.png]

RE: Analysis of patterns at the very start and end of lines, per line type - oaken - 17-09-2025

(17-09-2025, 09:50 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(17-09-2025, 02:27 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One could test that theory by separating all lines into subsets based on their first glyph, computing the word frequency distribution of each subset (excluding the first word of each line) and comparing those distributions.

I did a fast check. The cosine similarity plot suggests that the first character of a line doesn’t create a separate "language" within the manuscript. It may nudge the line in a certain direction, but overall the vocabulary quickly falls back into the same general pattern as the rest of the text.

Interesting. It's probably a completely unfounded thought, and one which would render the majority of the text meaningless and its production very strange. But what if the line start letter marks the only enciphered word in the line and the rest is nulls? Historically nulls are I think used at least in the same century as the vms production. It couldn't be that simple, right?

Edit: the other thing they reminded me of a little was the check numbers used by the Sopherim to ensure the hebrew bible was transcribed correctly.