20-10-2024, 07:26 PM
Koen, I’d like to start by saying your last video, talking about the small (and potentially even smaller) Voynichese glyph set, was pretty insightful, and gave me a lot to chew on mentally. I’m attempting to teach myself Hebrew and Arabic, so this has kind of Baader—Meinhof’d my mind into thinking about positional variation in other writing systems, and other forms of symbolic notation.
@-JKP- was the one who schooled me in medieval scribal abbreviations. Apparently the little loopty-loo final stroke of EVA=[m], EVA=[g], and the gallows glyphs, U+A76C or U+A76D, typically was shorthand for -is or -Cis at the end of a word. Many uses of this stroke occurred in the final word of a line, in order to save space, and time spent writing. I also remember -JKP- saying that this stroke was an ancestor to our present-day use of the hyphen to break a word at the end of a line. Apparently when the last word of a line was a partial word ending in a pigtail, there was little consistency in how much, if any, of the remainder of the word could be found at the beginning of the next line.
I’m with you and Prof Stolfi on EVA=[m] being a line-final variation, and ligature, of EVA=[iin]. I’m with Emma May Smith on EVA=[a] and EVA=[y] being equivalent. As for EVA=[g], my guess is a variation and ligature of EVA=[dy] or EVA=[edy], but that’s pure intuition. Lol. The problem with the latter equivalence is that those word-final ngrams are so common, at least in Currier B, and EVA=[g] is so rare. It raises the question to me of why EVA=[dy] and EVA=[edy] weren’t always abbreviated as EVA=[g].
I think any proposed Voynichese glyph and ngram equivalence is testable and falsifiable, as long as there are enough occurrences of both in a well-made transcription of the Manuscript. In other words, I think textual analytical statistics can be used to support a hypothesis that one unit of Voynichese writing is equivalent to another, by showing that they occur in highly similar environments, with the exception of one crucial factor, more often than would be expected on chance alone. The results could give some idea of the general rules governing what textual environments seem to strongly favor one over the other. Nablator’s and Patrick Feaster’s “heat maps” of the line, paragraph, and page positions favored by various Voynichese ngrams come to mind. Twould be mighty interesting to me if the heat maps for EVA=[aiin] and EVA=[am] filled in each other’s gaps when superimposed.
Throw in a pinch of LAAFU to my magic potion, and you can see how a way to cut a line short for lack of space might have been a very useful shortcut to the VMS’s creators.
@-JKP- was the one who schooled me in medieval scribal abbreviations. Apparently the little loopty-loo final stroke of EVA=[m], EVA=[g], and the gallows glyphs, U+A76C or U+A76D, typically was shorthand for -is or -Cis at the end of a word. Many uses of this stroke occurred in the final word of a line, in order to save space, and time spent writing. I also remember -JKP- saying that this stroke was an ancestor to our present-day use of the hyphen to break a word at the end of a line. Apparently when the last word of a line was a partial word ending in a pigtail, there was little consistency in how much, if any, of the remainder of the word could be found at the beginning of the next line.
I’m with you and Prof Stolfi on EVA=[m] being a line-final variation, and ligature, of EVA=[iin]. I’m with Emma May Smith on EVA=[a] and EVA=[y] being equivalent. As for EVA=[g], my guess is a variation and ligature of EVA=[dy] or EVA=[edy], but that’s pure intuition. Lol. The problem with the latter equivalence is that those word-final ngrams are so common, at least in Currier B, and EVA=[g] is so rare. It raises the question to me of why EVA=[dy] and EVA=[edy] weren’t always abbreviated as EVA=[g].
I think any proposed Voynichese glyph and ngram equivalence is testable and falsifiable, as long as there are enough occurrences of both in a well-made transcription of the Manuscript. In other words, I think textual analytical statistics can be used to support a hypothesis that one unit of Voynichese writing is equivalent to another, by showing that they occur in highly similar environments, with the exception of one crucial factor, more often than would be expected on chance alone. The results could give some idea of the general rules governing what textual environments seem to strongly favor one over the other. Nablator’s and Patrick Feaster’s “heat maps” of the line, paragraph, and page positions favored by various Voynichese ngrams come to mind. Twould be mighty interesting to me if the heat maps for EVA=[aiin] and EVA=[am] filled in each other’s gaps when superimposed.
Throw in a pinch of LAAFU to my magic potion, and you can see how a way to cut a line short for lack of space might have been a very useful shortcut to the VMS’s creators.
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