The Voynich Ninja
Single Leg Gallows - Printable Version

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RE: Single Leg Gallows - Jorge_Stolfi - 06-06-2025

(06-06-2025, 01:11 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Threads are getting bogged down into one vs multiple author discussions.

These posts could be moved to a separate thread, "multiple scribes" or whatever.

RE: Single Leg Gallows - Stefan Wirtz_2 - 06-06-2025

Indeed some space saving can be observed around those "big" letters, but this is mostly done otherwise:

p and f are followed by all small letters without problems (and are never directly combined).
But if there is a leading letter, very often this can be seen:

[Image: straits.png?etag=W%2F%222feac-6842eb8f%2...quality=85]

The front-end curl is just straightened to keep away from small leading letters.

So p  and  f are not simplifications of  t and k  (they are all already simplified), but similarily developed and just lifting a leg: 
If I had to "invent" or simplify an alphabet, I would try to keep the character set simple also.
Those things can continue to be different letters at all.

RE: Single Leg Gallows - Stefan Wirtz_2 - 06-06-2025

(06-06-2025, 11:06 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To understand the purpose of this manuscript we need instead to look at what is logical, possible, probable, plausible. It is my belief that people are thinking too hard about the manuscript. A simple solution is probably more likely. Something more in keeping with other 'secret' manuscripts of the period. A new alphabet for an existing language - not possible. An alphabet for an unknown language - improbable. Random gibberish - improbable, illogical. Encyphered text and to necessarily have to do it for all the ~36000 words - possible, not simple, not plausible. An artificial construction fraudulently created to sell on the market for a fortune in florins - plausible and simple.
(06-06-2025, 11:06 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]A new alphabet for an existing language - not possible.[..]

Sorry, this one is not good. There were many languages, also in Europe, which existed before and without having an own alphabet:
among the kartvelian languages is only Georgian coming with own alphabet, Laz, Mingrelian and Svan hat to borrow and adapt it.
Old Russian and Ruthenian developed own sets of different kyrillic, which was more or less adapted by other Slavic languages later. 
Croatian turned to Latin, but kept Glagolithic for clerical use.
Several turkic-based languages started with Arabic language, tried it with kyrillic for a while and changed to turks' Latin adaption. This is still happening to languages who are hundreds of years old but never developed an own alphabet.
All those changes are a "new alphabet" -- Voynichese may have been a unique (and failed) try to roll out some new alphabet to a smaller language as well.
Reminding of Kyrillic (which has many leans from Greek) this all looks not so new at all.

So, keeping it plausible and simple, the variant "new alphabet for an existing language" can be as probable as the "fraud"...

RE: Single Leg Gallows - R. Sale - 06-06-2025

IMO, we really have no clue as to whether this was five guys working for several weeks(?) of a single person putting sections together over multiple years. Handwriting changes with time, particularly given the possibilities of injury and old age.

The question is 'what' was done and 'why' was it done.

RE: Single Leg Gallows - tavie - 06-06-2025

Oh, this is my favourite area of study, thank you for bringing it up, and it's a shame I'm currently ill so this may be rather feverish and rambling but I will try to corral it.

Space-saving makes k = p
I agree that space - or lack thereof - may trigger a certain gallows.  Quite a few people have proposed this before:  I think Philip Neal pointed out that the ornate gallows tend to have more space above them, and someone else whose name I don't recall said it in an old thread of this forum. 

I don't think it's ever been quantified, but a visual look at various paragraphs in the Stars folios seems to show that the ornate (p/f) or unusual k gallows are often absent when the bottom row of the preceding paragraph is vertically close and suddenly burst into bloom when it is finished and there is suddenly a nice amount of vertical space to play around in.  The Voynich being the Voynich, there are of course counterexamples where there is plenty of space yet a plain k/t is used.

I wouldn't go so far as to say there is no cryptological element here.  The biggest problem when suggesting p = k (or p = t, etc) is that the following glyphs do not match up.  Scribe 1 in Herbal A tends to work best with a k = p mapping, because its k and its p tend to occur in the same clusters:  more Gallows-ch, Gallows-sh, Gallows-o and less Gallows-a and Gallows-e.  But the problem for the other scribes is that -  as Rene mentions -  k and t absolutely love to be followed by an e.  And yet p is remarkable for virtually never being followed by an e.  The few /pe/ instances may well be transcription errors for /pch/. 

p = ke
--> So the obvious solution is to rework and posit ke = p for these scribes.  I pick k because it tends to be suspiciously missing from the top row of lines just as p suspiciously appears, but there could be links between all the gallows.

p = ke/te has likely been thought of by a lot of people stretching back decades.  Nick Pelling as far as I know was the first to posit it in writing on his blog.  I was briefly super partial to it around a similar time and tried to see if the hook or flourish of some /p/ that Jorge mentioned could hide a missing /e/.  p = ke appears very pretty and convenient:  it explains why we don't see /pe/ despite the multitude of /ke/, and it's easy to find valid words by exchanging /p/ with /ke/.  e.g. qopol can become qokeol. 

But the ridigity of Voynichese makes it sometimes deceptively easy to mix and match certain glyphs...and sometimes not.  The problem is that /p/ absolutely loves /ch/.  It likes /o/ as well.  But it really loves /pch/ clusters.  And you don't see that many /kech/ and /tech/ clusters in Voynichese.  Nowhere near enough to make a mapping of k = pe or t = pe easy. 

There may well be a solution to this if we then try to mutate /ch/ into /e/ somehow or another complex mutation, but without finding the solution, we have just replaced one problem (p = k does not work due to lack of /pe/) with a new problem (p = ke does not work due to lack of /kech/). 

Some further random thoughts and complexities
  • I do think that - to some extent - choice of glyph or indeed choice of word type is influenced by the amount of space available.  I thought this was most likely at the left hand margin.  This is relatively rigid and less forgiving of trying to squeeze a glyph outside it to avoid an unsightly clash.  This may be behind the relative lack of some vertical pairs such as q-t and q-p, where you either need plenty of space such as a paragraph break or sufficient space between the lines to align the glyphs together...or you have the mess of the q descender slashing its way through the gallows' loops.  The Vertical Impact work I presented at last Voynich Day, and the paper I'm doing now, goes more into this.
  • I suspect that to some extent this behaviour occurs in the middle of the lines (e.g. if there is a long descender from the row above, this might influence a scribe to pick a word type without a tall glyph, or one where the tall glyph misses the descender) but this seems difficult to prove, since proximity of descenders to the taller glyphs is quite subjective and there are plenty of counterexamples including unsightly clashes.  But my headcanon is that we don't often see words that have been split by the descender or large horizontal spaces between words to avoid this as much as we might expect. Descenders often sneakily and "luckily" tuck their way avoiding taller glyphs.
  • I think the problem of the missing /pe/ is slightly overstated.  This is because i) I think /p/ tends to occur in specific environments where Gallows-e and Gallows-a tend to be a little less favoured than say Gallows-ch or Gallows-o.  And ii) more controversially, I have wondered if p tends to be added (or restored?) to initial ch words in the middle of the top row, thereby creating more of a bias for /pch/ than other clusters.  That is still nowhere enough to account for the mysterious missing /pe/ but it's something.
  • There may not be a suspicious quantity of missing /k/ in all top rows.  Scribe 2 in Baleonological doesn't seem to be missing that many when you compare the middle of its top row to the middle of the rest of the lines below it.  But then again, it is harder to feel confident about demarcating paragraphs in this quire.
  • Both k and t do not behave the same in all positions in all scribes, despite having a lot of similarities. This adds a bit more complexity.
  • P = k or ke doesn't help explain when /k/ is suspiciously absent in other positions where we don't see p either.
  • Especially in light of the last point, I also agree about multiple word type variants and flexibility for scribes to choose (although their initial choice of letter may constrain them after that).  The problem though is stopping this from making it unreadable to even the authorised reader.  This obviously isn't a problem if the text is meaningless, although it is hard to then explain why a meaningless text would have complex rules that don't seem to correlate with available space.

If there is vacant space, I can say something hopefully more coherent on this on Voynich Day.

RE: Single Leg Gallows - dashstofsk - 07-06-2025

I have more things to say about  f p .

Have a look at a list of the most frequent words that contain  f .  Then note that by replacing the  f with  k you get valid words that are frequent. But if you replace with  te or  ke you do not.

   


Similarily if you replace  p with  t te ke .

   


I think this must be the definitive evidence that  f is  k and that  p is  t , and that neither can be  te or  ke .

RE: Single Leg Gallows - ReneZ - 07-06-2025

Interesting, but I would not go so far as to call it definitive.

For example, it could be possible that okechedy is very rare, because it is preferably written opchedy

I am not saying that I think that that is the case. It is just a valid possibility.

RE: Single Leg Gallows - dashstofsk - 07-06-2025

(07-06-2025, 09:01 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.okechedy  is very rare, because it is preferably written  opchedy


Possible, but is it really going to be likely?

One of the things I wanted to suggest is that  f p might be nothing more than stylised variants of the more common double leg gallows. And that it was just a preference of the authors for writing them that way. And to give a plausible scenario that explains why they are written where they are written.

But it amounts to the same if you think instead that they might be  ke te .  This would still be consistent with my hypothesis of the manuscript being an artificial construction, something of which I am planning to say more in a future post.

RE: Single Leg Gallows - Jorge_Stolfi - 07-06-2025

(06-06-2025, 11:06 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To understand the purpose of this manuscript we need instead to look at what is logical, possible, probable, plausible. [...] A new alphabet for an existing language - not possible. [...]

There are several historical examples of a radically new script being developed for an existing language. For example, check Wikipedia for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  

That happened many times even for languages that already had a writing system, such as 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..  Or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. switching from an Arabic-based script to one based on Latin characters.  Or the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. proposed for English.  The creation of these new writing systems was usually motivated by the complexity of the previous script and/or its inadequacy to capture the sounds of the spoken language.  It is not inconceivable that the Voynichese script was created for the same reasons.

RE: Single Leg Gallows - Jorge_Stolfi - 07-06-2025

(06-06-2025, 11:06 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To understand the purpose of this manuscript we need instead to look at what is logical, possible, probable, plausible. [...] An artificial construction fraudulently created to sell on the market for a fortune in florins - plausible and simple.

One objection to this theory is that the VMS is not the kind of book that a scammer would create for that purpose.  To maximize the price and demand, he would have added some recognizable elements, like alchemical symbols, or pictures suggesting that the texts are recipes for long life, virility, hair restoration, ...

And the author would also have invested more in the aesthetics.  Like using only good whole sheets of vellum, line guiding rules, carefully drawn figures, carefully applied paint...

An art forger will try to paint a picture that could pass for the work of a famous painter.  Not a picture that looks like the work of an illiterate lunatic that no one has heard about...

However, I myself believe that the Herbal section may indeed be a late addition, created by the Author in order to "monetize" the VMs -- by recasting the Pharma section into the popular Herbal format, with most of the plant drawings invented from scratch.  Perhaps that section alone was meant to be sold or gifted, separated from the rest of the VMs.   But in this case, why keep the original language, and not translate it into Latin?  

All the best, --jorge