19-11-2019, 04:52 AM
JKP, I've read your work on your blog and on this forum arguing that the Voynichese glyphs are indigenous to southern Europe, rather than exotic. Let me state for the record that I find your argument convincing. Many sleuths who would have wasted countless hours exploring exotic writing systems from far off places (myself included) owe you a debt of gratitude. I'm reminded of the old folktale about the man who leaves his cozy home and travels far in search of a fabled treasure, only to eventually return home and find the treasure was buried under his own stove the whole time.
Whose transcription does Voynichese.com use? I only ask because I've found it prudent to actually look at the tokens it tags when I do a search. In a not insignificant number of cases, a token it tags as a match isn't actually a match at all. Voynichese.com is an invaluable tool for dabblers like me, but not an infallible one by any means.
I think you and I are thinking along the same lines when you speculate about vords being numbers, and I talk about a classification system or non-linguistic symbolic system. My wife is an engineer and math teacher, and she suggested that vords might be thought of as algebraic terms — set patterns of variables (i.e. factors) multiplied together. Each variable in the term gets assigned a value from a limited range, and together these make up the value (symbolic meaning) of the vord as a whole.
I'll give you an example from my line of work. In obstetrics and gynecology, every patient is given a code which sums up her entire obstetric history at a glance. It's written GnPnnnn, where each n is a discrete one-digit number. The G stands for "gravida", and the number after it is the total number of times she has been pregnant. The P stands for "para", and the four numbers after it stand for total births, premature births, abortions, and live births, respectively. My wife has a very uncommon ob-gyn code, which often catches healthcare workers' attention: G1P3303. (Meaning: she has been pregnant only once, and delivered a set of live triplets prematurely.)
Back to our beloved book, it's clear that each vord is made up of component parts in a fixed pattern, and each part can be one of a short list of possibilities. I've tentatively identified the number of c-shaped curves in the body of the vord as one of these component parts, having a value that can range from 0 to 6. If I'm on the right track with this sort of thinking, then the key will be breaking down vord construction into a minimal number of independent variables / degrees of freedom, and then counting and listing all the possible values that each of these variables can have. Then it's a matter of asking ourselves: What sort of phenomena, familiar and relevant to 15th century Europeans, would this set of variables be useful in describing or classifying?
Whose transcription does Voynichese.com use? I only ask because I've found it prudent to actually look at the tokens it tags when I do a search. In a not insignificant number of cases, a token it tags as a match isn't actually a match at all. Voynichese.com is an invaluable tool for dabblers like me, but not an infallible one by any means.
I think you and I are thinking along the same lines when you speculate about vords being numbers, and I talk about a classification system or non-linguistic symbolic system. My wife is an engineer and math teacher, and she suggested that vords might be thought of as algebraic terms — set patterns of variables (i.e. factors) multiplied together. Each variable in the term gets assigned a value from a limited range, and together these make up the value (symbolic meaning) of the vord as a whole.
I'll give you an example from my line of work. In obstetrics and gynecology, every patient is given a code which sums up her entire obstetric history at a glance. It's written GnPnnnn, where each n is a discrete one-digit number. The G stands for "gravida", and the number after it is the total number of times she has been pregnant. The P stands for "para", and the four numbers after it stand for total births, premature births, abortions, and live births, respectively. My wife has a very uncommon ob-gyn code, which often catches healthcare workers' attention: G1P3303. (Meaning: she has been pregnant only once, and delivered a set of live triplets prematurely.)
Back to our beloved book, it's clear that each vord is made up of component parts in a fixed pattern, and each part can be one of a short list of possibilities. I've tentatively identified the number of c-shaped curves in the body of the vord as one of these component parts, having a value that can range from 0 to 6. If I'm on the right track with this sort of thinking, then the key will be breaking down vord construction into a minimal number of independent variables / degrees of freedom, and then counting and listing all the possible values that each of these variables can have. Then it's a matter of asking ourselves: What sort of phenomena, familiar and relevant to 15th century Europeans, would this set of variables be useful in describing or classifying?