Rotating decoration on gallows f42v

[ChenZheChina]

Certainly not 3, since to me this looks like a real language and the characters look like letters. From that viewpoint, with these 2 becoming the same character the entropy will decrease even further and that seems unlikely ?

That’s very interesting a point of view. I’ve read some articles about entropy, but are not able to completely understand them yet. At least, what I could understand is that the H2-entropy of Voynich Manuscript is lower than any known languages, though I do not understand what conditional entropy is. It seems that lowering more the entropy makes it less like a real (natural) language.

I really don't know. It doesn't seem to lean toward one or the other. If it were a pilcrow, the shape wouldn't matter as long as the general idea is understood but I'm not certain they are pilcrows. SOME of them seem to act like pilcrows, but not all of them.

Hi JKP, is it possible that some pilcrows have double duty? For example, pilcrows came from capitula, which was simply a letter C with strokes (like S + strokes = $ or C + strokes = €). Is it possible that some writers omit the initial letter C or similar letters when writing pilcrows? For example, instead of writing:

¶Centaurus ...

They write:

¶entaurus ...

Just like some people nowadays would write Micro$oft or G∞gle for whatever reasons.

I also think that this initial stands for a letter. I would assume decorations of this type to plain text letters such as f, t, s or i, but not a, o, e or c. Both EVA-t and EVA-p are not open at the top. Maybe the "trick" was done with the rotation, and the decoration / part of the letter should actually go straight down (like other gallows / initials that are decorated with dots or dashes). Then I tend to EVA-t.

Hi bi3mw,

I don’t understand. What do you mean by “such as f, t, s or i, but not a, o, e or c”? I know that EVA-f, t and s are “tall” letters, while EVA-a, o, e and c are “short” letters. But why EVA-i? It is a short letter, isn’t it? Could you please explain in details?