Glyph counts between Gallows

[RenegadeHealer]

Hi Julian. I wasn't involved with the VMs when you were last active, but I've read your whole blog through a couple of times and am a big fan of your work. Let's just say I have a very good feeling about that recent paper by Rene Zandbergen. I'm not much one for cargo cults, but it seems like this paper is attracting a number of serious veteran VMs researchers back to the discussion table. I'm half expecting Prof Jorge Stolfi to show up and comment on it. If he does, I'd feel comfortable saying a breakthrough is not far away.

I lied. I love a good cargo cult. If everybody could help me out by saying his name in their comments, it makes the mojo stronger, and he's more likely to find this thread and show up, by the power of SEO. 

The number of glyphs that follow a benched Gallows is typically 3, before the next Gallows is encountered. For un-benched Gallows, this number is typically 5 to 7. This does not enthusiastically support the hypothesis that the benched Gallows are simply the same as un-benched gallows with the two adjoining glyphs written separately. For example, take a common sequence, with 7 intervening glyphs:
pxxxxxxxp

is clearly not equivalent to the common sequence for benched of:

PxxxP

since PxxxP written as un-benched would be

cphxxxcph
which only has 5 intervening glyphs.

First of all, my working definition of unbenching: Finding the ngram that's likely a benchless equivalent of a benched gallows glyph. By way of analogy, if my goal was to make a German text diacritic-free, I would change every occurrence of Bär to Baer.

I think there are different possible ways unbenching could be done, that may be a bit more promising. These days, in reference to Koen's comment, I'm inclined to treat [EVA=ch] as a single glyph. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and propose that if it weren't for benched gallows, [EVA=ch] being one inseparable entity would be a far less controversial idea. Therefore, I'm inclined to explore a method of unbenching which transforms cGh to Gch. I'm planning on running an experiment to test this possibility soon, using the statistics from voynichese.com. My working hypothesis is that if cGh is the equivalent of Gch, then the count ratios of cKh:Kch, cTh:Tch, cPhch, and cFh:Fch should be roughly equal.

Results:
cKh 907 : Kch 1093 = 0.8298
cTh 945 : Tch 992 = 0.9526
cPh 217 : Pch 752 = 0.2886
cFh 74 : Fch 193 = 0.3834

Hmm. Not quite as promising as I'd hoped. But I'm still intrigued by the fact that both of the two-legged gallows give a similar ratio to each other, as do both of the one-legged gallows.

Of course there's the old chestnut of why one-legged gallows prefer top lines of paragraphs so strongly. The idea I've been most given to entertaining recently is Nick Pelling's idea that P = Te and F = Ke. And then there's Brian Cham and Patrick Feaster's independent observation that a vord's curve glyphs (ch, sh, ee, and e) almost always occur together in the first half of a vord, with no glyphs interrupting the series except maybe a gallows. Connected curves (ch or sh) in a vord's series almost always precede unconnected curves (ee and e). A gallows, which occurs in surprisingly close to exactly half of all vords, typically either precedes the entire series of curves, or interrupt it near its beginning, where the connected curves are. This "interruption" can take two forms: either between two ch's (or a ch and a sh), or benching one of the ch's.

Taking all this into account, I'll stand on a very skinny limb and propose that cPh = Tche, and cFh = Kche. I'll crunch these numbers later and see how they compare to the figures above.

Another area for improvement is to exclude Grove words from all the counts. I don't think the gallows that make Grove words have anything to do with the gallows that occur anywhere else in the manuscript.