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

[pfeaster]

As [sh] is relatively more common in Quire 13 than other sections, [ch] more common in Hand 1 Herbal, [a] more common in Quire 2o, and [q] three times as common in Quire 13 than Hand 1 Herbal, I would really like to see those factored out. I think proof based on glyphs alone is probably best to ensure comparability and a robust sample size.

Emma -- thanks for your comments.  I know I have a bad habit of letting too much stuff accumulate before posting, so that when I do it tends to come out in chunks that are disagreeably large.  I'll try to work on that.  

In the past few days, I retooled one of my scripts to tackle the issue of "continuous" patterns more in earnest, and I think my latest results may be even more persuasive than the ones I posted before.  More soon, I hope.  But since you raise the issue of variation by section (and Nick Pelling raised this same issue in a comment on the blog post itself), here's another example in the meantime that might speak to it.

The experiment is to remove the first glyph and last two glyphs* from lines; to divide the remaining glyphs into five parts that are as equal as they can be, not counting spaces; and then to compare and contrast the occurrences of phenomena of interest in each of the five parts (such as glyph counts, spacing patterns, and bigrams).

If I do this for everything generally classified as Currier A, I get the following glyph counts in the five line sections:

[s]: 92, 134, 139, 185, 204
[ch]: 804, 692, 678, 673, 672
[Sh]: 312, 287, 229, 187, 149
[d]: 287, 379, 454, 536, 771

It's easy to see that the counts for [s] and [d] go continuously up, while the counts for [ch] and [Sh] go continuously down, and that the rates of change also differ from case to case.

If I limit the same study to just Quires 1-3, I instead get:

[s]: 29, 40, 34*, 64, 49*
[ch]: 355, 277, 294*, 276, 258
[Sh]: 109, 114*, 88, 70, 58
[d]: 113, 135, 164, 200, 300

This time there are four exceptions, which I've marked with asterisks, but the overall trend is otherwise the same for at least [ch] and [Sh], and there are no exceptions at all for [d].  Meanwhile, the low token counts for [s] look as though they could easily have fallen prey to random noise.

(If there's a better subset of Currier A to use for experiments like this than Quires 1-3, I hope someone will let me know.  I'd prefer to use a contiguous block of pages, but I'm not sure what the best Currier A equivalent is to Quires 13 and 20.)

I know this is just one example, but based on what I've seen so far, it seems to be typical of the relationship between findings for a whole "language" and findings for an associated section.  On the other hand, Currier A and Currier B seem to behave quite differently from one another in this respect as they do in so many others.  Of course, I have a constant dread that this will all trace back to some embarrassing mistake I made in my Python coding, but I seem to be getting consistent enough results by different methods that I'm feeling increasingly confident about them.

I have my own ideas about what these "continuous" patterns might mean, which I hinted at in my post, but I'm curious what others make of them and their potential significance.  Unless I'm mistaken, their existence would throw a bit of a monkey wrench into some theories about how Voynichese works.

* Why the first glyph and last two glyphs, you ask?  That choice actually had nothing to do with this particular experiment and came about only because I wrote the script mainly to analyze TRANSITIONAL probabilities (the likelihood of a given glyph type being followed by another given glyph type) and wanted to exclude the first and last transitions.  The fact that it counts the first glyphs of bigrams in each line segment is just a handy byproduct.