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

[pfeaster]

The plots for 'k' and 't' look similar and, if they are combined as RGB channels of a single image (at the bottom), the result mostly consists of lighter or darker yellow tones, with little or no green or red.  Line plots (on the right) look very different from each other and combining them mostly results in reddish / greenish areas corresponding to the prevalence of 'k' or 't'.

This new type of multicolor display seems really effective.  Your examples inspired me to adapt one of my existing scripts to generate something similar, although it arranges line lengths in the opposite direction (shorter lines at the bottom, longer lines at the top) and the height of rows varies to keep the area per word position consistent.

I thought it might be interesting to see how the position of the character within the word affected distributions within lines.  Here are three different plots for [Sh] in green versus [ch] in red, where the first plot is limited to word-initial [Sh] and [ch] and the second plot to word-internal [Sh] and [ch], while the third plot shows both word-initial and word-internal cases combined.

   

The word-initial (left) and word-internal (middle) plots look strikingly complementary, which probably supports the idea that line-start words containing [Sh] and [ch] are somehow "equivalent" to mid-line words that start with [Sh] and [ch].  But it also looks as though the first and second words of lines tend to be yellower (indicating a higher [Sh] to [ch] ratio) for longer lines than for shorter ones.

Here's a similar set of three plots for [k] in green versus [t] in red.

   
 
The overall prominence of [t] along the left edge appears to be due primarily to word-initial [t], and also (although these plots don't show it) mainly to paragraph-initial [t].  Meanwhile, the gradual "reddening" from left to right seems to be due almost entirely to word-internal [t].  But as with [Sh] and [ch], shorter lines seem to follow the contrastive patterns less clearly than longer ones, at least if we separate the word-initial cases from the word-internal ones.