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

[pfeaster]

A few things which interest me: does every possible glyph pair have a rightward difference? Are some pairs significantly more than different than others? And are there clear most/least rightward glyphs? I suppose my concern is that, if this is systemic, what does that mean? Does that make it more or less likely to be an artifact or a phenomenon?

Those are all excellent questions, and I'd imagine the first few, at least, ought to be reasonably straightforward to figure out with further work.  My sense so far is that if we disregard [g] and [m], the glyph with the strongest tendency (leftward in this case) is [Sh].  But there also seems to be the "shape" of the distribution to be considered, along with overall average rightwardness.  For what it's worth, I created a couple graphs today showing the variation in token quantities in each fifth of the line for [a], [ch], [d], [l], [n], [q], [r], [Sh], and [y] in Currier A and Currier B.  As with the figures I gave before, these calculations leave out the first glyph and last two glyphs of each line, so any patterns should be basically line-internal.  I kept the color-coding the same for both "languages" in hopes of making comparisons easier to draw.