Vord paradigm tool

[pfeaster]

This is a further attempt to present lines of Voynich text in meaningful or at least suggestive ways. A slight detour from the matter of Vord Paradigms, but part of the same quest. 

Any effort to analyze lines based on formal features like this has the potential to reveal interesting patterns, so I'm continuing to enjoy reading about these experiments.  But I join Marco in observing that any number of other features could be used to break lines up into similar chunks.  So far you've proposed two criteria for defining breaks within lines: (1) transitions between "vowel"-initial and "consonant"-initial vords and (2) words containing gallows.  It's worth noting that these two criteria mostly result in different line divisions.  Here's one of the lines you cited earlier, divided up according to both of your criteria by way of example:

1. Division by initial "vowel" versus initial "consonant," with vords containing gallows highlighted:

oees.olkeedy.
qockhy.raiin.chol.
okair.oteedy.
qopchedy.
odaiin.ypchedy.ykam-

2. Division by vords containing gallows, with transitions between initial "vowel" and initial "consonant" highlighted:

oees.
olkeedy.
qockhy.raiin.chol.
okair.
oteedy.
qopchedy.odaiin.
ypchedy.
ykam-

The last three vords end up handled the same way, but the first nine vords of the line end up handled quite differently.  The "chunks" identified by the first method don't line up with the "chunks" identified by the second method.

Of course, it's possible that one of the two criteria represents a meaningful break point and the other doesn't.  But if we're interested broadly in formal features that seem to be distributed non-arbitrarily within lines (e.g., through clustering, alternation, intrusion, etc.), I suspect that different features will, as a rule, group words differently, into mutually overlapping units, rather than forming consistent, non-overlapping, independent chunks.

If each line were a list, and one type of formal feature (such as a gallows vord) were to mark the start of an entry in the list, it seems that the contents of the entries would still show a lot of patterning *across* entries.  I suppose certain kinds of lists could show overlapping groupings and cycles, something like this (which I've modeled after a typical 19th century rural diary):

Tuesday 28, clear and sunny
Wednesday 29, cold, sunny
Thursday 30, cold, rain
Friday 1, cold, rain
Monday 2, cold, rain
Tuesday 3, warm, rain
Wednesday 4, warm but cloudy
Thursday 5, rain
Friday 6, more rain

Still, I'm not sure whether that's a better fit for the rhythms of Voynichese than, say, overlapping categories of case (nominative, accusative, etc.) and part of speech (noun, adjective, etc.).

If we don't assume a priori what the glyph categories are, would there be any way to infer them reliably from the line patterns?

This is something that Emma and I investigated in our You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. See in particular p.9 and 10. While we focussed on a specific phenomenon (how the last glyph of words tends to correlate with the first glyph of the following word), it is possible that the issue could be analysed in a more general way, including start-start correlations and end-end correlations. Torsten pointed out You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that shows an interesting set of tables about this.

The technique used in that Cryptologia paper of comparing actual distributions against the distributions predicted by random shuffling is powerful and can yield extremely interesting results -- as it does there.  It can certainly reveal specific preferred and dispreferred pairings: end-start, start-start, end-end, etc.

But I'm not immediately sure how to bring it to bear on what Hermes777 calls "clusters," "alternations," "intrusions," and "bracketing," if those are in fact meaningful distinctions.  A "preferred" pairing could be interpreted in multiple ways: a word beginning [Sh] is more likely than average to be followed by a word beginning [q], but that could mean either that [Sh] and [q] are in the same class (and form clusters together) or are in different classes (and frequently alternate or mutually intrude).

Maybe there's a way to attempt this, though.  Here are two lines Hermes777 has cited recently:

(1) yees.ykchol.oty.ytor.ytar.ytchor.ytaiin=

(2) shol.chol.shoky.okol.sho.chol.chol.chal-

In (1), [oty] stands out as the only vord in the line that doesn't begin with [y].  In (2), [okol] is the only vord that doesn't begin with [sh] or [ch], which are similar enough for many models to group them together.  Both times, the [o]-initial vord appears just to the left of the center of the line.

I guess I could see working out the probability of such lines existing with a random shuffling of vords, and then comparing them against how many such lines actually appear.  I've made no effort to check whether they're at all common -- I'm just using this as an example; maybe these are the only two such lines in the whole manuscript.  In Hermes777's own analysis, (1) is a "cluster" and (2) is an "intrusion," so from that standpoint, the apparent similarity between these two lines shouldn't turn out to be significant.  But the challenge, I suppose, would be to determine whether any patterns of clustering, alternation, intrusion, bracketing, etc. stand out as significantly more common than they "should" be.  Clustering is a reasonably expected pattern based on other models.  The others, not so much -- so confirming those might be more exciting.