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

[pfeaster]

Marco, if I recall correctly, the take away lesson from that study of yours is that vords to the immediate left of images tend to be typical line-final vords, and vords to the immediate right of images tend to be typical line-initial vords.

As I read it, Marco's analysis is more nuanced than that.  Some of the patterns are like line-break patterns, while others differ from them.  For an example of a difference, gallows are common line-initially but rare immediately after an image-intrusion.  Same with [q].  And yet there are also enough similar patterns to suggest some kind of continuity between the two situations, as with line-initial and post-image-intrusion [y] and [s].

Patrick, I seem to recall that your current understanding of labels in the VMs, is that of functional line units of a single vord.  In other words, a label tends to begin like a typical line-initial vord, and end like a typical line-final vord.

Yes, that's where I am right now, at least with the most common "label" vords.  Endings such as [ry] seem particularly telling.  But I await counterarguments and am sure there must be some.

Given Patrick's demonstration of downward effects at the paragraph and page level, and the old problems of Grove words and the affinity of [f] and [p] for the first lines of paragraphs, it wouldn't surprise me if Voynichese also contains apparent metadata for "start a new page", "same paragraph new line", "new line new paragraph", and other formatting and line placement instructions.

All the fascinating discussion in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of "multipass" phenomena could perhaps point to one need for metadata.  If meaningful text was in fact written in different orders (left-to-right, top-to-bottom in columns, etc.), it might have been necessary to be told the order to read it correctly without making a lot of false starts.

You mention downward effects at the page level -- I have no evidence myself as yet about those one way or the other, and the idea that they might exist is still only speculation as far as I know.  The first lines of paragraphs do seem distinctive all around, though; it's not just gallows that behave oddly there.

The question then becomes, what kind of information, recorded and shared and of value to people in the early 1400s, would have benefitted from having this kind of formatting and placement metadata attached to it?

Just about anything -- *if* the metadata were tied to the encoding method itself.