Unusual Words

[Mark Knowles]

In fact it seems to me that the overwhelming weight of Voynich research has been looking at the patterns and structures of those words that I see as fillers not the unusual words that I am most interested in which I think are often discounted as though they were just background noise.

How can we prove which scenario is closest to the truth?

That's an excellent question.

I suppose what needs to be done is to well-define the filler text as much as possible, which is of course means that there is value in studying the patterns and structure of Voynichese even where that pattern and structure is just the pattern and structure of the filler text. If one understands the pattern and structure of the filler text then one can more easily identify what is the non-filler meaningful text.

I am reminded of a discussion on a radio programme about Chaos theory that I listened to many years ago. The discussion related to a secret conversation that had been recorded between two people. It wasn't possible to determine what was being said from the recording of the conversation as a loud vacuum cleaner what turned on throughout the conversation(presumably to conceal the words). However the vacuum cleaner produced a very repetitive sound, which was very predictable, whereas the sound of the conversation was much much less predictable. So the vacuum cleaner sound could be removed from the recording to reveal the sound of the conversation. When one thinks of this scenario one might imagine the conversation as the pattern and the sound of the vacuum cleaner as the noise, but, in fact, when analysing it one is best suited to viewing the vacuum cleaner as the pattern and the conversation as the noise.

I am not sure how easy it is to prove either scenario. I think it is best to explore the implications of the different scenarios and see where they take one.