Time to retire Currier languages?

[Helmut Winkler]

The folios of the manuscript are known to have been shuffled out of their original order.

That is simply not true, it is one of thr urban legends of Beineke 48 research.  There is no reason to believe that the order of the original author was changed because there never was an order planned beforehand

The quire numbers are inconsistent with the foliation, and some of the wide bifolios have been rebound along different folds from what was clearly intended. Anyone claiming that what we are looking at now was the original intended state is codicologically naive and/or not looking very hard.

And that's before we even get to all the (very strong, very persuasive) evidence about the herbal pages and Q13.

Nick, I suppose it's my bad English or maybe you didn't read what I wrote or you didn't understand, I said that there was no original plan or order, the ms. is a sequence of more or less independent notes, any attempt to restore an original state leads to nowhere

[bi3mw]

The quire numbers are inconsistent with the foliation, and some of the wide bifolios have been rebound along different folds from what was clearly intended. Anyone claiming that what we are looking at now was the original intended state is codicologically naive and/or not looking very hard.

And that's before we even get to all the (very strong, very persuasive) evidence about the herbal pages and Q13.

So would you say that the entire VMS is bound in a completely random way, or is it just individual folios that are sorted incorrectly? The extent of the mis-sorting is an important point for me, but I can't infer anything from your statement.

[RenegadeHealer]

Originally an unbound notebook. The notes might have always been groupable into X number of thematic sections. The original keeper of the notebook might very well have tended to keep the leaves thematically grouped, but not necessarily in any set order. A later owner decided to bind it. At least one more owner rebound it. The binders did not agree on the order that the leaves and quires ought to be bound, because the original creator of the unbound notes never made it clear.

Or something along these lines, no?

[Anton]

When speaking of order, the folio 1r always comes to my mind. With no intended order or organization of, let's say, an "opus", this folio would hardly come to life.

[Helmut Winkler]

Originally an unbound notebook. The notes might have always been groupable into X number of thematic sections. The original keeper of the notebook might very well have tended to keep the leaves thematically grouped, but not necessarily in any set order. A later owner decided to bind it. At least one more owner rebound it. The binders did not agree on the order that the leaves and quires ought to be bound, because the original creator of the unbound notes never made it clear.

Or something along these lines, no?

I am more or less, mutatis mutandis, of the same opinion, thank you

[Helmut Winkler]

When speaking of order, the folio 1r always comes to my mind. With no intended order or organization of, let's say, an "opus", this folio would hardly come to life.

I think you are wrong there,  1r was not written on and bound to the front more or less as a over, the same with 116v, which was bound for the same reason to the back

[RenegadeHealer]

I am more or less, mutatis mutandis, of the same opinion, thank you

You’re welcome. Sorry to butt in; a big part of my job is rephrasing complex technical statements in plain English without loss of accuracy. I do it almost reflexively now when I witness two people talking but missing each other’s points.

[MarcoP]

An advantage of the Currier A/B split is that it is easy to understand and to verify: pages where CUVA bigram SO (EVA:cho) is more frequent than ED are A, the others are B. This is cruder than Currier's analysis, which acknowledged that, when also looking at other bigrams, there are a few hard to classify pages (mostly astro/cosmological). But I would say that these plots show two visibly distinct clusters.
The left graph is labelled by scribe, the right by folio. Colours correspond to sections, as in the graph at the bottom of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 

   

What I am greatly puzzled about is the variability inside both Currier A and Currier B. Since Scribe 1 is basically the same as Currier A, the variability is still there is one splits the manuscript by Scribe. In other words, we cannot say "bigram distributions are different because different scribes preferred different spellings".
The problem with Scribe 1 is particularly clear on the  SO vs EO plot, where the Pharma pages (yellow squares) and some of the HerbalA (i.e. Scribe1-Herbal) pages bound near the Pharma pages appear to belong to the same cluster as the other scribes, while most Herbal A pages form a separated cluster.

   

This can also been observed in the top 20 words from Herbal A and Pharma. The list for Pharma includes four 'eo' words (three of them in the top 10), while no 'eo' words appear in the HerbalA list.


╔══════════╤═════╤═╤════════╤═════╗
║ Herbal_A │ ....│ │ Pharma │ ....║
╠══════════╪═════╪═╪════════╪═════╣
║.daiin....│ 4 9 │ │ daiin..│ 4 1 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.chol.....│ 2 6 │ │ chol...│ 1 8 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.chor.....│ 1 8 │ │ cheol *│ 1 5 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.s........│ 1 4 │ │ okeol *│ 1 4 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.shol.....│ 1 3 │ │ ol.....│ 1 4 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.cthy.....│ 1 1 │ │ or.....│ 1 3 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.chy......│ 1 1 │ │ qokeol*│ 1 1 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.sho......│ 1 0 │ │ aiin...│ 1 0 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.dain.....│ 1 0 │ │ okeey..│ 1 0 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.dy.......│ 0 9 │ │ qokol..│ 1 0 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.dar......│ 0 8 │ │ qokeey.│ 1 0 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.shor.....│ 0 7 │ │ dal....│ 1 0 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.chey.....│ 0 7 │ │ chor...│ 1 0 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.or.......│ 0 6 │ │ chey...│ 0 9 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.qotchy...│ 0 6 │ │ dar....│ 0 9 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.shy......│ 0 6 │ │ cheor *│ 0 9 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.cthol....│ 0 6 │ │ s......│ 0 9 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.ol.......│ 0 5 │ │ shey...│ 0 8 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.qokchy...│ 0 5 │ │ dol....│ 0 8 ║
╟──────────┼─────┼─┼────────┼─────╢
║.cthor....│ 0 5 │ │ okol...│ 0 7 ║
╚══════════╧═════╧═╧════════╧═════╝

Lately I have been asking myself: is it possible to understand if the changes in bigram distributions are a continuum or a set of discrete steps? My impression is that a continuum could be a better explanation, but I think that quantitative methods should be able to provide a more objective answer.

In conclusion, the simple split between two languages is certainly inaccurate (and Currier already knew it had limits). At a certain point, it should be replaced with something better but I don't think we have a sound alternative yet. Working with scribes offers a finer granularity, but the variability within Scribe1's corpus is an issue.

[Torsten]

Frequently used word types in Currier A are [daiin] and [chol]/[chor], whereas for Currier B [chedy] and [shedy] are commonly used. Is it possible to describe a development from Currier A to Currier B? To answer this question it is only necessary to count word types typical for Currier A or B within each section. 

Since [chol] and [chor] are typical for Currier A and [chedy] and [shedy] are typical for Currier B it seems reasonable to count all word types starting with [ch-] or [sh-]. The five most frequent [ch-]/[sh-]-word types for the different sections are:

	1nd	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	word count
Herbal (A)	chol (228)	chor (155)	shol (104)	sho (96)	chy (95)	8,087
Pharma (A)	chol (45)	cheol (40)	chor (24)	cheor (24)	chey (21)	2,529
Astro	shey (7)	chol (6)	cheo (5)	cheey (4)	cheor (4)	2,136
Cosmo	chedy (24)	chey (20)	chol (19)	chdy (17)	chey (16)	2,691
Herbal (B)	chedy (62)	chdy (53)	shedy (35)	chkchy (35)	chey (20)	3,233
Stars (B)	chedy (190)	chey (123)	shedy (113)	shey (84)	cheey (77)	10,673
Biological (B)	shedy (247)	chedy (210)	shey (99)	chey (94)	sheedy (43)	6,911

The table demonstrates a general principle for the Voynich manuscript. Top-frequency types dominating one page or section might be rare or missing on the next one. However, all pages or sections do have in common that pairs of frequently used words with high mutual similarity appear (see Timm & Schinner 2020, p. 3).

It is possible to reorder the sections that as a result two sections with similar word frequencies follow each other. The resulting table shows the counts for the most frequent [ch-]/[sh-]-types:

	chol	chor	cheol	cheo	chey	shey	chdy	chedy	shedy	word count
Herbal (A)	228	155	28	14	55	40	7	1		8,087
Pharma (A)	45	24	40	11	21	19	1	1	1	2,529
Astro	6	2	2	5	2	7	1	4		2,136
Cosmo	19	8	5	2	20	16	17	24	17	2,691
Herbal (B)	13	6	6	1	20	6	53	62	35	3,233
Stars (B)	62	19	52	30	123	84	40	190	113	10,673
Biological (B)	14	1	29		94	99	23	210	247	6,911

In Herbal A [chol] and [chor] are frequently used, but in the Pharmaceutical section [chol] is used together with [cheol]. It is interesting to note that a type [cheol] also exists in Herbal A. However [cheol] occurs less frequently in Herbal A. (It is even possible to find a single instance of [chedy] for Herbal A.)

This way it is possible to describe a shift from [chol]/[chor] via [cheol]/[cheor], [cheo]/[sheo], [chey]/[shey], to [chedy]/[shedy]. The result of this shift is a "gradual evolution of a single system from state A to state B" (Timm & Schinner, p. 7). The gradual evolution of a single system also explains the fact that Currier A and B have numerous patterns in common.

[Emma May Smith]

Marco, you make some excellent points.

I suppose the minimum we should do is separate by scribe and section. I have the word counts for each section as:

Hand 3, Stars: 10766
Hand 1, Herbal: 8481
Hand 2: Balneology: 6956
Hand 4: Cosmological: 3083
Hand 1: Pharmaceutical: 2586
Hand 2: Herbal: 2361
Hand 2: Rosettes (rear): 1855
Hand 3: Herbal: 1336
Hand 5: Herbal: 929
Hand 2: Stars: 129
Hand 4: Rosettes (front): not counted

Given that some of the Hand 1 Herbal pages should be excluded (anything after f57), then by far the largest single part of the text is Hand 3 Stars. Hand 1 Herbal (early) would be next, followed by Hand 2 Balneology. I think three different examples of text provides us with the ability to compare and contrast.