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

[MarcoP]

Here are new grayscale images for [daiin] in Currier A and B, side by side.

   

Thank you, Patrick. Once again, your research is so interesting! These graphs make me question an assumption that is very appealing in other respects: that daiin "means" the same in Currier A and B. Your plots point out that the word behaves quite differently:

• in A it shows a marked preference to appear at the end of paragraphs;
  
• in B it is almost totally absent at the end of paragraphs; it mostly appears at the start of lines (but not first lines).
  

Given that aiin is so frequent in B, it seems possible that (in B) daiin is a line-initial variant of aiin, one of Emma's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. As I discussed with Emma (and possibly on the forum) years ago, it does not seem that daiin in A can be equivalent to aiin in B, since daiin often appears reduplicated as daiin.daiin while aiin never does. 

Both A and B have dark areas at the start of paragraphs: I guess this is due to the prevalence of Grove words and does not tell us much about A:daiin vs B:daiin.

I'm wondering if you would see anything like this at all in regular manuscripts. Maybe in the first position due to capitalization, and maybe in the final position due to increased incentive for using abbreviation-related glyphs. For anything outside of that, I can't think of any good examples.

Hi Koen,
similar patterns can be observed in poetry (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). I hope to replicate Patrick's new plotting method in the future and run a few experiments, but I do expect that Shakespeare's sonnets will show some patterns. Of course, in a sonnet, a line really is "a functional unit", often a complete sentence or phrase; Voynichese does not look like poetry and these paragraph-level patterns are unexpected in prose. It would be interesting to experiment with abbreviated texts: as you say, something will likely show in those cases too; here we have the usual problem that diplomatic transcriptions are hard to find.