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

[RenegadeHealer]

Here are some modest hypotheses I'd like to put forward for critique, based on the foregoing:

1. If the opposite of "flat" is "bumpy," then the text of the VM is fundamentally bumpy, not just superficially bumpy.
2. Its bumpiness isn't limited to beginnings of paragraphs or to beginnings or ends of lines (although it especially affects those places) but extends throughout the whole body of the text.
3. Its bumpiness isn't limited to nonce similarities among nearby vords (basic self-citation) but constrains the text by position according to consistent patterns.
4. Its bumpiness affects the text structure thoroughly enough to preclude any method of text generation (whether natural-language plaintext, cipher, invented language, stochastic hoax, or "other") that is fundamentally flat with only minor tweaks made to the result.

First off, thank you for another exciting spelunk into the VMs text, Patrick. This is clearly a much deeper and more complex network of tunnels than most of us could have imagined. What impresses me the most about your work is your willingness and ability to think outside the boxes of "the arrangement of glyphs in vords" and "the arrangement of vords in lines", when looking for statistical patterns in the text. It's humbling, though very much in a good way, to have the unconscious blinders on one's thinking pointed out.

I feel like a Shang Dynasty oracle bone reader when I look at the "shapes" — the lines and blobs and holes — produced by your and Obelus' two-tone frequency maps. I can almost make out a massive capital letter A in one of them. I feel like these shapes might offer meaningful clues, but I'm not at all sure why, or in what way, and I'm wary of falling prey to pareidolia or mistaking maps for territories. These "shapes" are in all likelihood mere epiphenomena of your data collection and presentation methods. But they got me thinking seriously about something which has been kind of a dirty word in Voynich studies since William Romaine Newbold's fall from grace: steganography. I don't mean this specifically the way Newbold did. That is, I don't think the Voynichese glyphs encode information in their tiniest details. I mean steganography in a broader sense. Think ASCII art and its predecessor the calligram. Or connect-the-dots or paint-by-numbers activities. All three of these involve complex and deliberate spatial arrangements of written glyphs. These glyph arrangements are not linguistic, but they are most definitely meaningful. The meaning is directions for how to connect them together visually to form images, including large scale glyphs or symbols. Could Voynichese ngrams be encoded directions for how to place lines or colors or some other sort of information array on a page?