[Blog Post] Rightward and Downward in the Voynich Manuscript - Patrick Feaster

[MarcoP]

Hi Emma,
thank you for your comments! I agree that absolute effects clearly play a major role in line-structure. It would also be interesting to understand if such absolute effects are limited to the first and last position or if they involve other absolute positions (the second looks like a particularly good candidate).

In order to investigate different sections and scribes, I reproduced one of Patrick's experiments (the one discussed in the first post in this thread). The figures are about 'o' and 'qo' as word prefixes. My results (bottom) are well aligned with Patrick's (top).

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Then I used the same script to analyse the three larger subsections that were written by a single scribe and are uniform in apparent contents:

• Scribe1 Herbal (aka Herbal A)
  
• Scribe3 Q20 (almost all the starred-paragraphs section)
  
• Scribe2 Q13 (Balneo / Bio)
  

These are the resulting plots:

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As one could expect from your observations, the behaviour pointed out by Patrick is the result (the average) of different behaviours. But my impression is that there is an overall coherence:

• though there is much variability at line boundaries, the three sections show an increasing o/qo ratio in positions 4-9
  
• changes in the distributions follow an A to B progression, with Scribe 3 (Q20) being intermediate between Scribe 1 (HerbalA) and Scribe 2 (Q13, extreme B).