04-05-2025, 08:40 PM
The Gloria meme is pretty funny.
It gives me a serious idea, too, to add to the list: maybe there are lyrics from a real language, but the lyrics are extremely simple or repetitive. If there are only half a dozen distinct syllables in the lyrics used in the entire MS, then the author might have used abbreviations for them... which might mean no chance of figuring out the plaintext.
Even if we can't tell what the words are, there could still be some statistical properties we could use to test this idea:
Given a proposed division of the text into "lyrics" and "non-lyrics" parts, it should be possible to combine most lyrics-parts with most non-lyrics-parts and get valid segments of Voynichese. Like if a whole book was filled various settings of "twinkle twinkle little star", the syllable "twi" should eventually appear with most pitches and rhythms.
Given some way of extracting just the lyrics parts, they should be made up of a sequence of chunks which almost always appear in the same order, optionally with some sub-sequences repeated, or repetitions of the whole sequence. And some sub-sequences should be much more common to repeat than others. For example, if the plaintext lyrics were "gloria in excelsis deo", then "gloria in excelsis deo gloria in excelsis deo" should be very common, and "gloria gloria" should be common enough, and "glo- gloria" might be possible but should be pretty rare, and "excelcelcelsis" should not appear at all unless the scribe made a mistake.
If the rhythm is notated precisely, which is definitely not a reliable assumption, then there might be sections of the text, physically near each other, which add up to the same total duration. (Verses or polyphonic parts.)
I wonder what the distribution of various pitch and rhythmic indicators is in known music notation systems...
It gives me a serious idea, too, to add to the list: maybe there are lyrics from a real language, but the lyrics are extremely simple or repetitive. If there are only half a dozen distinct syllables in the lyrics used in the entire MS, then the author might have used abbreviations for them... which might mean no chance of figuring out the plaintext.
Even if we can't tell what the words are, there could still be some statistical properties we could use to test this idea:
Given a proposed division of the text into "lyrics" and "non-lyrics" parts, it should be possible to combine most lyrics-parts with most non-lyrics-parts and get valid segments of Voynichese. Like if a whole book was filled various settings of "twinkle twinkle little star", the syllable "twi" should eventually appear with most pitches and rhythms.
Given some way of extracting just the lyrics parts, they should be made up of a sequence of chunks which almost always appear in the same order, optionally with some sub-sequences repeated, or repetitions of the whole sequence. And some sub-sequences should be much more common to repeat than others. For example, if the plaintext lyrics were "gloria in excelsis deo", then "gloria in excelsis deo gloria in excelsis deo" should be very common, and "gloria gloria" should be common enough, and "glo- gloria" might be possible but should be pretty rare, and "excelcelcelsis" should not appear at all unless the scribe made a mistake.
If the rhythm is notated precisely, which is definitely not a reliable assumption, then there might be sections of the text, physically near each other, which add up to the same total duration. (Verses or polyphonic parts.)
I wonder what the distribution of various pitch and rhythmic indicators is in known music notation systems...