Glyph counts between Gallows

[MichelleL11]

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.

Hi, Julian:

It's great to see you with a new posting.  I continue to mull over what your results could mean.

One thing I would be curious about is whether there is a difference in your numbers between Currier A and Currier B.  Of course, breaking it up could reduce the numbers such that the results are less reliable.  Apologize if Marco did this -- I have not reviewed his data yet.

Also, in a more general sense -- do the distance between occurrence of any letter in -- say English or Latin -- show the same sort of peak around 3 or 5 with a long tail?  

I assume this would be connected to frequency.  If so, what frequency in English or Latin is needed to exhibit a similar behavior? 

Or is this gallows glyph behavior one of the "non-language" characteristics that is not mimicked by any particular single letters in, say -- English or Latin?  Is this kind of distance measurement so similar to secondary entropy that it is particular to Voynichese (or other languages with low entropy --- etc., etc. -- no need to test)? 

As for Grove words -- my understanding of their definition is that it is all words that have a gallows glyph as the first(?) glyph and if that glyph is removed, a "valid" (e.g. seen elsewhere in the manuscript) word remains.  I don't think word position in the paragraph is involved, but I could be wrong.

I agree it would be interesting to see if removing such examples of gallows use from your numbers how the graphs are changed.

The theory is that these kinds of gallows glyphs are more likely to serve some other function than "the same" substitution proposed by that same gallows glyph use in other word environments.  This is because in "non-Grove" words the glyph use is what turns the word into a "valid" word and therefore is more likely to be representing some letter or group of letters in the plaintext.

But "Grove word" gallows glyphs have a theoretical greater chance of having some sort of non-letter function (paragraph signal/topic signal/item signal/punctuation-like) or maybe a signal to interpret the substitution going forward in some particular way?

But this is just my impression from conversations on the board and elsewhere and I could have misinterpreted.

Thanks for considering doing some of these additional analyses and I will be reviewing your and Marco's data with great interest.

Michelle