Discussion of "The Voynich Manuscript: Symbol roles revisited"

[MichelleL11]

Hi, Renegade:

Thanks so much for notifying us that this has been revised.  I agree that the first half of this paper is just another way (although unique, I enjoyed learning about time series analysis) to showing mathematically the same thing that has been said so many other ways before -- the VM text just doesn't act like natural language.  But the one piece I found very interesting was this section at page 10, last paragraph:


   



Why do I find the overabundance of integer frequencies and common divisibility by 40 or 160 interesting?  Because I am on constant look out for the VM's "Period 17" data.  A seventeen-based periodicity is what began the process that finally broke the Zodiac Killer's 340 cipher.  Granted, it took a while, but without that initial clue, I'm sure Dave and company would still be running tests.

Could this periodicity of the Fourier Discrete Transform frequencies as integers (first) and then being divisible by 40 and 160 (second) be routes in to better understanding the text creation process?  My understanding is what Fourier Transforms do to time series data is essential act as filters to separate noise from non-noise in the data sets.  It is commonly used in electrical engineering to "pull out" regular signals when the time series data is messy.

For example, this is how it is discussed in Brockwell & Davis, a book cited as "an excellent introduction to the theory" of time series analysis in the cited reference -- Venables & Ripley (2013).  Here's a link to the whole book if anyone's interested -- 
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The dotted lines in this signal + noise graph are achieved (revealed) by using the Fourier Discrete Transform to know which portion of the data should be eliminated to achieve a "smoothing" of the data.  In this particular example, eliminating a particular fraction of the Fourier series expansion of the signal  (that fraction that was high-frequency (above f=.035)) allowed for an estimate of the underlying signal.

I simply don't know the math well enough, but could some sort of selective smoothing as was done with the electrical signal graphed above to find and smooth out its "noise component" allow for a true signal to be pulled out from the VM data?  Or is the pattern described in the paper sufficient to figure out some sort of useful pattern for understanding how the text was constructed without "smoothing" the data?  I'd love to hear from the paper's authors or someone with enough math background as to what that paragraph could mean practically.

But, that potential rabbit hole aside, I did want to comment that although I applaud the effort in the "ligatureness" analysis, I'm not particularly convinced.  That's because I don't see how turning some subset of combinations of glyphs not currently seen next to each other in the text into a single glyph is going to explain either the "chaotic behavior" OR, more importantly, the weird positioning of gallows glyphs within lines, paragraphs, and on the page in general.  Instead, I believe that it is this selective positioning that results in the "chaotic" behavior of these particular glyphs rather than some sort of glyph combination process.  

In fact, this what I would ask the authors to show:  knock down any selected, presently there common glyph combination into a single symbol and show that this causes that single symbol to change into exhibiting the chaotic behavior attributed to the gallows glyphs in the time series analysis.  With this kind of data, I would begin to buy into the idea that being a ligature can cause the "abnormal" time series behavoir. Until then, I hypothesize it is because gallows glyphs show up overwhelmingly in certain locations within the text at the line, paragraph and page level (unlike the rest of the glyphs which are more internally associated with each other).

I had hoped that Julian Bunn's page imagery data would support my assertion, but it doesn't seem he did the gallows -- or at least he didn't report them in his blog posting:  
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But with all that verbiage spilled, I still think this is very interesting and hope to get some insight from those more mathematically trained than I as to the applicability of such analysis to our problem.