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

[obelus]

This new type of multicolor display seems really effective.

Like @pfeaster, I appreciate visualizations that summarize large amounts of data for consumption by the human visual channel (with its enormous bandwidth and pattern recognition ability).

This type of modified Palmer stack -- character density indexed by word position -- devotes the vertical axis to line length, instead of downwardness.  But is there anything happening in this dimension?  A survey of numerous glyphs and combinations finds that the density per line generally follows the global line-length distribution.  The stack for y (anywhere within a word) is typical:

   

The brightest row occurs at the most-probable line length of ~10 words.  Density fades above (steeply) and below (gradually) in accord with the global distribution.  The single EVA  glyph that obviously deviates is T, with ~900 instances in the paragraph-text sample as cTh.  It prefers shorter lines (and greater rightwardness).  Among EVA bigrams, only ho has a clear bias for shorter lines.  Distributions strongly favoring longer-than-average lines are not evident.

@pfeaster has illustrated complementary pairs by multiplexing the patterns by color.  When we generate multiple stacks and look for complementarity, some dramatic contrasts can be found, even between T and t:

   

The rightwardness alternation early in short lines is real.  The apparent transition as a function of line length, however, is driven by T alone.  No deep relationship between glyphs is asserted or implied here;  the idea is just to test-drive this new method for the visual display of line-position information.

Readers searching for spatial relations between gallows characters, or camouflage for a holiday party, may wish to contemplate the full glory of the gallows-gallows Palmer stack array:

   

Entries on the diagonal necessarily show the densities of individual characters, as saturation of {1,1,0} yellow.  Entries reflected across the diagonal are redundant, with the hues simply reversed.  A naive summary of visible patterns would include:

• The densities of several gallows character pairs delineate the boundary between the first and second word, as well as the penultimate and ultimate word, while k and f alone do so weakly at best.
  
• Some pairs involving k and t further delineate the boundary between the second and third word.
  
• Only T (and perhaps the infrequent P, as cPh) drives bias along the vertical line-length axis, visible here as vertically stratified hues.
  
• ...?