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+--- Thread: Different behaviours in line-final words...? (/thread-3021.html)
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - nickpelling - 16-12-2019
(16-12-2019, 09:31 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Rather than considering a virtual right margin in the final manuscript, I would prefer to consider a true margin in a source document, for example a draft.
If the hypothesis that the Voynich has (somehow) managed to preserve much of the formatting in the source document(s) it was derived from is correct, then it would be a reasonable prediction that the right hand edge in the source document was also straight.
In which case one might reason that the source document probably used hyphens, something that the EVA -m line-terminal groups also suggest.
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RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - RenegadeHealer - 16-12-2019
(15-12-2019, 07:58 AM)-JKP- Wrote: 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.
JKP, I'm hoping someday you can get a think tank together to sit down with you and go over all this raw data, and brainstorm some new ideas for how to mine it, parse it, and arrange it to look for deeper patterns. I know several times you've said you couldn't find any helpful leads in any of the token occurrence patterns. Coming from someone multitalented and multilingual who knows the VMS as intimately as some know their Torah or Qu'ran, that's not encouraging. But if there really are any second-level patterns to the patterns you noted (and ultimately meaningful symbolic language), it's possible that there is someone out there whose perceptual and cognitive filters are better primed to detect them than the data-collector himself.
But the question then becomes, what do they have to gain (and lose) by trying to interpret your data? And what do you have to gain (and lose) by letting them? Not fun questions to wrestle with, don't get me wrong.
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - -JKP- - 16-12-2019
I've been trying to work out a way to share this.
The problem is I originally made these tools to solve the VMS, not to share. They seem to be two different things.
When you share, you have to use formats and protocols that are generally accepted and known and available. Everything I use was created by me.
I created my own fonts because I wasn't satisfied with what was out there.
I created my own transcripts because what I found wasn't accurate or flexible enough.
I created my own database to store all the information from the concordance (which I also created myself) because there was nothing at all to do these tasks. It's an essential resource and lets you look up any pattern in the VMS almost instantly, with stats, locations, dependencies and relevancies.
So now I have this huge resource that is not compatible with anything else out there. Sharing it piecemeal doesn't seem to work. I'm a big picture person and the bits and pieces don't mean anything unless you have the whole puzzle in front of you. But if I give it all away, then I'm giving away 12 years of work.
So... as of a couple of days ago (because of threads like this), I'm putting some brain cycles into how this can be done (and whether it should be done). I hate seeing people re-invent the wheel when good tools are available, but there also has to be a balance. It wouldn't be fair if I simply gave up a considerable chunk of my life and got nothing in return.
I'll give myself a week or so to see if I can find a solution.
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - MarcoP - 16-12-2019
Hi Nick,
in the post you linked you ask:
Quote:In Voynichese, we see the EVA letter combination ‘-am’ predominantly at the right-hand end of lines, which has given rise to the long-standing suspicion that this might encipher a hyphen character, or a rare character (say ‘X’) appropriated to use as a hyphen character. For what conceivable kind of character would have a preference for appearing at the end of a line?
In manuscripts that are not much abbreviated, abbreviation signs can have a preference for the end-of-line position.
An example was recently discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
A few years ago, I posted a different example on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (BAV Vat Lat 410, in particular, see the 3-like 'rotated m' through the manuscript, and the rarer -9 for us). I believe that EVA:m and g could be abbreviation signs. For what is worth, m looks like an r-abbreviation and g like a d-abbreviation.
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RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - RenegadeHealer - 16-12-2019
(16-12-2019, 07:30 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So now I have this huge resource that is not compatible with anything else out there. Sharing it piecemeal doesn't seem to work. I'm a big picture person and the bits and pieces don't mean anything unless you have the whole puzzle in front of you. But if I give it all away, then I'm giving away 12 years of work.
So... as of a couple of days ago (because of threads like this), I'm putting some brain cycles into how this can be done (and whether it should be done). I hate seeing people re-invent the wheel when good tools are available, but there also has to be a balance. It wouldn't be fair if I simply gave up a considerable chunk of my life and got nothing in return.
Exactly. If I were a treasure hunter who had a promising lead after many years' work but had hit an impasse, I'd be sorely tempted but extremely wary of revealing everything I knew to anyone. Finding a person both qualified to offer me constructive help and trustworthy enough to not just take the treasure for themselves first would be a major problem. After all, as Benjamin Franklin said, two people can keep a secret, as long as one of them is dead.
I think wheel-reinvention might just be an unfortunate but unavoidable side product of any race to solve a mystery. There can be only one true solution (at most), and finding it is a zero-sum game. There are real incentives to share and collaborate, but there are also very real attenuating forces to these incentives. I'm reminded of a clinical rotation I did when I was learning psychiatry, which involved visiting a homeless shelter and resource center exclusively for diagnosed schizophrenic patients. Schizophrenic people feel the world as a hostile place, and are globally scared of pretty much all other people. However, like all people, they need some social interaction to get access to things they can't do themselves. So a conversation in the shelter became a form of currency — something everyone needed but nobody really wanted wholeheartedly. Being willing to converse with someone and share information was a favor that was traded quid pro quo. I feel a similar though less severe social force at work here and in many special-interest communities around a mysterious phenomenon: trusting others has both very real benefits and equally as real drawbacks.
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - Anton - 16-12-2019
(16-12-2019, 01:54 PM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(16-12-2019, 09:31 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Rather than considering a virtual right margin in the final manuscript, I would prefer to consider a true margin in a source document, for example a draft.
If the hypothesis that the Voynich has (somehow) managed to preserve much of the formatting in the source document(s) it was derived from is correct, then it would be a reasonable prediction that the right hand edge in the source document was also straight.
In which case one might reason that the source document probably used hyphens, something that the EVA -m line-terminal groups also suggest.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
This "source document" hypothesis is shaky: it leads us to the conclusion that the source document had the same drawings. Otherwise, it's not clear why, preserving the supposed margin of the source document in certain places, the scribe did not take the trouble to preserve it in other places. E.g. in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the supposed "source document" receives no respect. Why would it be respected e.g. in the first paragraph of f22v?
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - Koen G - 17-12-2019
(16-12-2019, 11:45 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This "source document" hypothesis is shaky: it leads us to the conclusion that the source document had the same drawings.
I fail to understand why this would be problematic though. There are so many possibilities. Maybe at some point various versions existed.
(16-12-2019, 01:43 PM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Koen: that's exactly the right starting point, though you'd probably need trigraphs etcto avoid going too fine with EVA strokes, e.g. octh.
It sounds like an interesting experiment, and I'd like to do it, only I lack the required skills
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - Anton - 17-12-2019
Quote:I fail to understand why this would be problematic though. There are so many possibilities. Maybe at some point various versions existed.
Not exactly problematic, just ends in a loop. Referring the VMS properties to a source document, what would explain those properties in the source document?
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - nickpelling - 17-12-2019
(16-12-2019, 11:45 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This "source document" hypothesis is shaky: it leads us to the conclusion that the source document had the same drawings. Otherwise, it's not clear why, preserving the supposed margin of the source document in certain places, the scribe did not take the trouble to preserve it in other places. E.g. in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the supposed "source document" receives no respect. Why would it be respected e.g. in the first paragraph of f22v?
Actually, what I argued in 2006 (in Curse) was that it seemed very probable to me that the maker of the Voynich Manuscript worked hard to retain the page layout used in the original source document(s), even though the text / pictures had (almost certainly) all been changed / warped / mutated / adapted / whatever in the process. I don't currently believe the original drawings were the same as what we see, not at all: but I do strongly suspect that the overall layout stayed basically the same.
As to your examples of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f22v: until such time as we have the original source document(s) to hand, how can we tell what the original margin was or wasn't in any given case? Both these pages may well turn out to have retained the original layout just fine. :-)
RE: Different behaviours in line-final words...? - Anton - 17-12-2019
Well... I'd look at this at a slightly different angle. Suppose we suspect certain glyphs or glyph combinations to be line-ending (or whatever-ending) markers. Then wherever they occur, this marks (or matches) the line-ending of the source document.
What is thus decribed is not retaining the page layout of the source document, but making it revealable.