12-10-2025, 09:24 AM
(11-10-2025, 08:41 PM)quimqu wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think that the first characters of each line were written first. Look here, in red, there is a small space between the first and the second character.
There are several issues involved here...
Again, the distribution of characters in line-start position is determined by the distribution of words in line-start position. So studying the latter may be more informative than studying the former.
As remarked before, one consequence of the trivial line-breaking algorithm is that the line-initial words tend to be longer than average. I would bet that y and qo are more common at the start of longer words than of shorter ones. So this length bias should indirectly contribute to the enhanced frequency of y and q in line-initial positions. If it does note explain all the anomalies, what anomalies are left to explain?
Most of the time there is a clear difference between "narrow spaces" (assumed to separate characters of a word) and "wide spaces" (assumed to separate words). But the spaces have natural random variation and will generally stretch or shrink depending on the available space. Thus often one must guess the type of a space.
(And the decision that there are only two types of space was unconsciously made by transcribers way back in the punched card era, because that is the rule in most European writing systems. But maybe the VMS Scribe also used half-wide spaces between the words of a compound, and extra-wide spaces between sentences, and ... In most European languages oblique pronouns are written either as separate words "say it to us" or joined to the verb "ditecelo"; but in Portuguese spelling they are joined with hyphens, "dize-no-lo". Are there "hyphen spaces" in Voynichese?)
Quote: In green, there is an evident ink density difference between the first and second character. This makes me think that a first character column was written before the whole lines.
Watch out -- if you go that way, you will soon be seeing hordes of ghostly Retracers...
All the best, --jorge