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

[MarcoP]

Treating sentences as lines is certainly interesting, but I doubt that VMS lines are sentences (but who knows?).

Is there any way to test this?  What data would you expect if it was sentences?

Hi Michelle,
Obelus' experiments with King James Bible treat sentences as lines:

* King James Bible, Scofield Ed., Books 1-5:  chapters parsed as "paragraphs," grammatical sentences as "lines."

I guess that Obelus' findings are consistent with what could be expected:

One pattern is apparent even to a non-linguist:  complementary distributions of objective vs subjective pronouns.  For example, "thou" and "thee:"

.....

Distribution of the objective case is reversed.  "He" and "him" show the same pattern:

....

Similarly, "they" and "them:"

....

Whether such patterns are observable in English-language texts generally, or other subject-verb-object languages, is a question for the technical literature I suppose.

I believe that these patterns could be observed in any other English text as well as in other languages with a more-or-less rigid positional syntax.
These patterns are thought-provoking parallels for some of the VMS phenomena, but there are significant differences e.g.:

• VMS line-start and line-end words often are morphologically different from other words, with distinct prefixes (at line start) and suffixes (at line end).
  
• Graphically, VMS lines do not appear to be sentence like, in particular, they are reasonably aligned on the right margin in comparison to (say) verses in a poem.
  
• The VMS shows significant paragraph structure, apparent for instance in Obelus' 'shol' and '*ta*' plots: lines at the top and bottom of paragraphs behave differently. This does not seem to be the case with King James Bible (at least, in the cases shown but Obelus; I guess that processing text differently or choosing different words could show paragraph patterns).