25-02-2017, 08:12 AM
I started this thread in order to clarify why five out of (approx.) 25 Voynich characters ( q f p m y ) almost certainly cannot represent substitutions of written characters in some plain text.
The short summary is, that f and p appear almost exclusively at top lines of paragraphs, m at ends of lines (not sentences), q at starts of words, where it is followed by o, while y is at the end of every third word type.
This is a way of saying that the Voynich MS text cannot be the result of applying a simple substitution to a plain text in most languages of interest.
This was already known from entropy considerations, but there are plenty of people who either don't understand the maths, or don't trust it. This alternative explanation is something more simple and more visual. It is also complementary, and anyone claiming that the text actually is a straightforward rendition of a meaningful plain text has to explain both.
There is of course much more to be said about it.
For one, there are several underlying assumptions.
One is, that the text has to be read from left to right. This actually makes essentially no difference. (And as a matter of fact, entropy is independent of the reading direction).
Another is, that the word spaces are real. This is a more complicated question, but if one were to assume that the word spaces are not real, one runs into many other problems.
Another highly interesting question is, whether the conclusion formulated for 'written characaters' (letters) is also valid for 'spoken language' (phonemes). This is certainly much less clear. At the same time, one has to realise that several of the observations (in particular for f p ) are anomalies that are specifically related to the writing.
If five of the characters cannot represent plain text letters, then that puts in doubt the entire Voynichese alphabet. There are in fact other anomalies that are less obvious.
Without enumerating them all, the main one (in my opinion) is the pairing of characters. There are several pairs that can be substituted for each other almost arbitrarily:
ch / Sh
k / t
f / p
l / r
o / qo (at word start)
However, the frequencies of the resulting words are not evenly distributed, so it does not look like something arbitrary.
The last pair in the above list is particularly interesting, since both o and qo appear in the running text, but only one of them appears in the labels.
That's a dead giveaway of something.
We just haven't figured out yet of what.
It does tell us that the creation of the text is not something arbitrary. There is reasoning and a plan behind it.
The same conclusion follows from the fact that label word distribution is almost flat, while the running text has a Zipf-like distribution.
The short summary is, that f and p appear almost exclusively at top lines of paragraphs, m at ends of lines (not sentences), q at starts of words, where it is followed by o, while y is at the end of every third word type.
This is a way of saying that the Voynich MS text cannot be the result of applying a simple substitution to a plain text in most languages of interest.
This was already known from entropy considerations, but there are plenty of people who either don't understand the maths, or don't trust it. This alternative explanation is something more simple and more visual. It is also complementary, and anyone claiming that the text actually is a straightforward rendition of a meaningful plain text has to explain both.
There is of course much more to be said about it.
For one, there are several underlying assumptions.
One is, that the text has to be read from left to right. This actually makes essentially no difference. (And as a matter of fact, entropy is independent of the reading direction).
Another is, that the word spaces are real. This is a more complicated question, but if one were to assume that the word spaces are not real, one runs into many other problems.
Another highly interesting question is, whether the conclusion formulated for 'written characaters' (letters) is also valid for 'spoken language' (phonemes). This is certainly much less clear. At the same time, one has to realise that several of the observations (in particular for f p ) are anomalies that are specifically related to the writing.
If five of the characters cannot represent plain text letters, then that puts in doubt the entire Voynichese alphabet. There are in fact other anomalies that are less obvious.
Without enumerating them all, the main one (in my opinion) is the pairing of characters. There are several pairs that can be substituted for each other almost arbitrarily:
ch / Sh
k / t
f / p
l / r
o / qo (at word start)
However, the frequencies of the resulting words are not evenly distributed, so it does not look like something arbitrary.
The last pair in the above list is particularly interesting, since both o and qo appear in the running text, but only one of them appears in the labels.
That's a dead giveaway of something.
We just haven't figured out yet of what.
It does tell us that the creation of the text is not something arbitrary. There is reasoning and a plan behind it.
The same conclusion follows from the fact that label word distribution is almost flat, while the running text has a Zipf-like distribution.
