Is that normal?

[JoJo_Jost]

I was looking for a pattern in the LAAFU effects. To do this, I arranged with an AI all the glyphs in a grid and removed the spaces without changing the order of the glyphs in a line. This produced some lovely images! 

Letters were highlighted if they accounted for more than 40 per cent of the characters in a column.

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[JoJo_Jost]

and so on

[JoJo_Jost]

and there are plenty more like them, but these effects do not appear in all folios.

What do you think about that?

[ololololo]

I don’t quite understand what this shows… What exactly is abnormal here?

[DG97EEB]

Did you run a null with an English, Latin, German text?

[oshfdk]

Most of the patterns seem easy to explain by the word structure of Voynichese. Suppose, there is a column that's by chance big on ch. It will be followed by a column big on o, since o very often follows ch. So, looks normal and expected, I guess.

[ololololo]

Most of the patterns seem easy to explain by the word structure of Voynichese. Suppose, there is a column that's by chance big on ch. It will be followed by a column big on o, since o very often follows ch. So, looks normal and expected, I guess.

Oh, well, that’s also possible. In that case, I don’t see anything abnormal.

[nablator]

Did you run a null with an English, Latin, German text?

A word-shuffled text (on each line or each page) would be more useful.

[DG97EEB]

Did you run a null with an English, Latin, German text?

A word-shuffled text (on each line or each page) would be more useful.

Indeed.

[JoJo_Jost]

I compared it to a text in which I had distributed the Voynish glyphs at random.

I measure exactly what is highlighted in the diagrams: grid columns, atoms, left-aligned, without spaces; a column is considered conspicuous if a glyph occupies ≥40 per cent of ≥4 cells.

   

The mixed text has the same layout — the same number of pages, the same number of lines, the same line lengths, the same glyph frequencies. Only the order has been disrupted. It nevertheless produces 175 conspicuous columns; this is the baseline level produced by the frequency distribution alone. But the Voynich text has 497!

So: the effect seen in the graphs is genuine. It is not what a randomly shuffled alphabet would produce on its own. At the start of a line, it is eleven times as strong as chance; in the rest of the line, it is a good twice as strong.

Note: the figures were calculated using Claude Faible and I have cross-checked it using Chatgpt Sol

(A Bavarian text adapted to the specifications yields 176 such columns (in a first quick test)).

One reason is likely to be the highly structured slot structure of the VMS, which does not exist in any language in this form – but I cannot yet say whether that is the only reason.