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+--- Thread: Different behaviours in line-final words...? (/thread-3021.html)
Different behaviours in line-final words...? - nickpelling - 14-12-2019
Hi everyone,
It's now becoming much better known that certain glyph sequences are far more common in either Currier A or Currier B, which is good. But I was wondering today: if certain glyph sequences are so much rarer in A or B than in the other, why do they occur in the other at all? Surely if they were (let's say) 'prohibited' by some implicit rule, we shouldn't see any instances of them at all?
And so I started looking at occurrences of popular glyph patterns in the Currier language where they were less popular. My first target was EVA chd (pink) and EVA shd (cyan), not in B (where they are most popular) but in A (where they are far rarer). Here's a voynichese.com query for this:
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What was immediately apparent to me from this was that in Herbal A pages, EVA chd/shd occur most often either in the last word of a line, or in the last word immediately before the text is interrupted by a drawing, e.g.:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f9r You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f15r (twice) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f24r You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (four times) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f30r You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f47r (twice) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f56r You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (twice) f93v
I believe that this sits far beyond the realms of simple probability, and I suspect that what we are seeing here is visual evidence for some kind of systematic contraction in A pages in places on the page where the desired text is larger than the space available for writing. I suspect there may well be many more (and not just EVA -m words).
Has anyone done any tests on letter sequence properties specifically on words that are either line-final or are just before an interrupting drawing?
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - -JKP- - 14-12-2019
I've been trying to find the thread (it's really hard to find a specific old thread, so many basic search terms apply to thousands of posts), but I started a thread some years ago on interesting behavior of glyphs and glyph groups (this was based on patterns that came to the surface when I created my VMS Condordance).
It describes behaviors of specific words in relation to others and I had also planned to include phrases, and I have quite a bit of information where certain patterns occur within the line or paragraph.
There didn't appear to be much interest in it, so I let the thread die. I think these are important patterns, so I hope your thread gets more attention than mine.
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - nickpelling - 14-12-2019
As a quick follow-on, if you look for EVA lk in Herbal A pages, of the six instances only one is on the end of a line (f90r1), which is - ballpark - pretty much what you'd expect to see if there were no correlation between it and line-terminality. And similarly for EVA lt (eight Herbal A instances, none of which are line-terminal).
Also: Herbal A EVA ed appears line-terminal on f11r, f32r, f51r, f65v, f93r, i.e. five instances out of sixteen. This is significant, but not as noticeable as the chd/shd stats (21 span-terminal instances out of 36 total instances, where you would expect something closer to 6 or 7 if the two were uncorrelated).
All of which makes me think EVA chd in Herbal A may well be a very specific contraction. And given that EVA chod is much more common in Herbal A than EVA ched (a mere three instances), I specifically wonder whether we are seeing EVA chod being contracted into EVA chd at line endings because of lack of space.
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - Koen G - 14-12-2019
(14-12-2019, 11:48 AM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I believe that this sits far beyond the realms of simple probability, and I suspect that what we are seeing here is visual evidence for some kind of systematic contraction in A pages in places on the page where the desired text is larger than the space available for writing. I suspect there may well be many more (and not just EVA -m words).
Agreed, this does not look like it can be a coincidence, well found! A more systematic investigation of such words might prove useful.
So in this case, the idea would be that a word like [chdy] is a shortened form for something else. It can't be [chedy] because that's also a B-feature. Chod would be a better candidate indeed.
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - VViews - 14-12-2019
(14-12-2019, 02:50 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I've been trying to find the thread (it's really hard to find a specific old thread, so many basic search terms apply to thousands of posts), but I started a thread some years ago on interesting behavior of glyphs and glyph groups (this was based on patterns that came to the surface when I created my VMS Condordance).
Hi JKP,
Could this be the thread? I looked at all the threads you started and this seems to be the one closest to what you describe:
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Or it's possible that if it's an old one, it may have been lost in the Coventry event.
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - -JKP- - 14-12-2019
VViews, wow, I appreciate you taking the time to try to hunt up the thread. Thank you.
Unfortunately, that's not the one. It was a new thread, about individual tokens and patterns, ones of particular interest and described their behavior. I can't remember how many I did before it seemed like there was almost no interest in it.
I tried looking for it, but I'm working today, my time is limited to only a couple of minutes or so.
The reason I even mention it now is because the last month or so has shown a lot more interest in the text and I really do feel these patterns are important. Maybe these things just need to be posted when interest comes back around to the text. I'm happy there are more text threads lately, and also that Nick started this thread.
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - Anton - 14-12-2019
The chdy is interesting. It appears in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the context not suggesting lack of space. It is a frequent vord with 152 occurrences in the corpus. Furthermore, the chdy chdy sequence occurs several times, not just two or three times.
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - -JKP- - 15-12-2019
Okay, I found some of them. They were basically introductions because I expected some followup commentary and I had more information that I wanted to add if there was interest in the subject. The followup commentary was sparse (only a few people seemed interested) and some of it was only about how the Takahashi transcription differs (I'm quite certain Takahashi was wrong), so I never posted the rest of the info, but here are some examples:
oteey You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
chok You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
okor You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I have 1100 pages of information like this (a concordance of the location and behavior of every pattern in the VMS), plus a related database, plus a color-coded transcript, plus a lot of statistical information for each. It would probably take me a year to write it all up.
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - MarcoP - 15-12-2019
These are counts based on Takahashi's transliteration. As always, I could have made errors.
More than half of the chd words in A appear either at line-end or before an image-break (21/40). I agree that this is a large deviation from what is expected. A slight preference for these positions in still observable in B - this is clearer for the before-plant position, 2.2% of chd words appearing there vs an average (and expected) 0.6%.
Things are harder for shd, since the pattern is quite rare in A and shows even less preference in B.
| line-end_A | bef-plant_A | ALL_A || line-end_B | bef-plant_B | ALL_B
ch | 276 | 7.3% | 224 | 5.9% | 3799 || 483 | 7.8% | 43 | 0.7% | 6170
chd | 14 | 35.0% | 7 | 17.5% | 40 || 85 | 11.5% | 16 | 2.2% | 742
sh | 59 | 4.3% | 57 | 4.2% | 1368 || 124 | 4.3% | 5 | 0.2% | 2865
shd | 0 | 0.0% | 3 | 37.5% | 8 || 15 | 9.3% | 1 | 0.6% | 162
AVG | 1791| 14.1% | 1050| 8.3% | 12716 || 2716| 11.0% |183 | 0.7% | 24586
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - ReneZ - 15-12-2019
The strange bit is that this behaviour is also observed if 'chd' is somewhere in the middle of the word and not at the end. That is, if I saw that correctly.