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

[pfeaster]

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.

I tried plotting [daiin] in blue versus [aiin] in green for Currier B to see how their distributions compare with each other.  

Alas, it's tricky.  This is one of those cases where the treatment of uncertain spaces can make a big difference.  The break before [aiin] often falls into what I think of as an "ambivalent" category, with the combination of [aiin] and the preceding vord also appearing written together as a single vord without an intervening space, as well as with ambiguous spacing, e.g., with [raiin], [r.aiin] and [r,aiin] all being attested.

With that in mind, on the left below I show the result ignoring all comma breaks, and on the right I show the result treating all comma breaks as real vord divisions.

   

On the left, it looks as though [aiin] peaks in second position, with additional peaks at mid-line and near-end-of-line (but not in actual last position).  On the right, the second-position peak seems to spill over into the next position, and the near-end-of-line peak is much stronger, with two weaker [aiin] peaks appearing between the other peaks.  In both cases (but especially on the left), there also seem to be mid-line areas where [daiin] is more common than [aiin], though these are dark areas overall in which both vords are underrepresented.  It seems almost as though regions favoring [daiin] or [aiin] are alternating with each other, or else as though mid-line [aiin] is concentrated in a few peak positions while mid-line [daiin] is more evenly distributed as a kind of background.

For what it's worth, here's a similarly generated plot for [daiin] in blue versus [chol] in green in Currier A:

   

That's not quite the same pattern, but it provides another example where a difference between first and second line positions seems to be "echoed" through a kind of mid-line alternation or vertical banding.  I'm trying to decide whether this is an artifact of processing or not.  I've tried limiting analysis to lines of specific lengths, and the banding seems to persist -- that is, to cite just one example, [daiin] turns up a fair amount as the third and fifth vords of ten-vord lines in B, but not as the fourth vord.  Still, there's less data available when we limit our scope in that way, so it can be hard to tell whether there's a meaningful pattern or not.