30-05-2019, 10:51 PM
Joben, several years ago, I spent more than two years (exhaustive and exhausting work) creating a VMS concordance.
In other words, I mapped every single recurring word to its shape-mates throughout the manuscript. The document describing these relationships is more than 1100 pages long and I also have the majority of the common tokens in a database that lets me pull out occurrences and relationships, and even common "prefixes" and "suffixes" associated with tokens that occur both alone and within other tokens.
It was a huge commitment of time and effort.
In terms of "meaning" (define that as broadly as possible) none of the things I hoped or expected to see emerged from this deep study of token relationships. It simply does not come out like viable content on specific subjects or like normal linguistic patterns.
The only really obvious patterns were:
So I tried again with token-pairs. Same result.
Looking at this data, some people would conclude that Voynichese is nonsense text.
I don't think nonsense-text is the only possible explanation.
Symbolic?, synthetic?, OR perhaps a need to parse the spaces and adjacent glyphs in a different way. This might still result in meaningful content, but it means going back to the drawing board and approaching it with fresh eyes.
It's my personal opinion (and not everyone agrees) that we should be suspicious of spaces—VMS tokens are not necessarily words. I also think there may be multiglyphs (I've blogged about this), but peeling them out (if they exist) is not as easy as simply looking at frequencies. There are places in the VMS where pairs appear to behave as units, but elements from these pairs sometimes seem to behave as parts of triglyphs, or even as elements in their own right.
I can recognize if Voynichese is faked. Voynichese is consistent enough that algorithmically defined look-alikes are almost always easy to spot (providing they haven't cheated by simply replicating whole tokens). I can also quickly spot the common glyph-combination patterns and can explain exactly why Rugg's method doesn't work. But I cannot tell you what Voynichese means (if anything) even after creating four transcripts and a massive relational concordance.
In other words, I mapped every single recurring word to its shape-mates throughout the manuscript. The document describing these relationships is more than 1100 pages long and I also have the majority of the common tokens in a database that lets me pull out occurrences and relationships, and even common "prefixes" and "suffixes" associated with tokens that occur both alone and within other tokens.
It was a huge commitment of time and effort.
In terms of "meaning" (define that as broadly as possible) none of the things I hoped or expected to see emerged from this deep study of token relationships. It simply does not come out like viable content on specific subjects or like normal linguistic patterns.
The only really obvious patterns were:
- that "n" tokens are more likely to relate to one another in the plant sections and "ot-" words in the astrological/cosmological sections, and
- "rare" tokens were almost always combinations of common tokens (a bit like compound words in English), and
- certain tokens were more prevalent on certain folios, as though frequency priority had shifted sightly. This MIGHT be semantic, or it might be a slight adjustment in how the text is generated if it's contrived or synthetic, and
- some tokens look suspiciously like Latin loanwords but, in a manuscript as long as the VMS, it's rather easy to find real words (and sometimes phrases) in many languages if you cherry-pick certain patterns, so this may be an artifact.
So I tried again with token-pairs. Same result.
Looking at this data, some people would conclude that Voynichese is nonsense text.
I don't think nonsense-text is the only possible explanation.
Symbolic?, synthetic?, OR perhaps a need to parse the spaces and adjacent glyphs in a different way. This might still result in meaningful content, but it means going back to the drawing board and approaching it with fresh eyes.
It's my personal opinion (and not everyone agrees) that we should be suspicious of spaces—VMS tokens are not necessarily words. I also think there may be multiglyphs (I've blogged about this), but peeling them out (if they exist) is not as easy as simply looking at frequencies. There are places in the VMS where pairs appear to behave as units, but elements from these pairs sometimes seem to behave as parts of triglyphs, or even as elements in their own right.
I can recognize if Voynichese is faked. Voynichese is consistent enough that algorithmically defined look-alikes are almost always easy to spot (providing they haven't cheated by simply replicating whole tokens). I can also quickly spot the common glyph-combination patterns and can explain exactly why Rugg's method doesn't work. But I cannot tell you what Voynichese means (if anything) even after creating four transcripts and a massive relational concordance.