28-01-2026, 11:27 PM
(This post was last modified: 28-01-2026, 11:28 PM by zachary.kaelan.)
So apparently a pretty common thing in medieval times was to make lines very cleanly justified by any means necessary, including abbreviation.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I hypothesized that this would mess with statistics around drawings and line breaks. I filtered by lines not at the top or bottom of a paragraph, looked at a bunch of statistics, and made some observations.
Observation 1: The letter "e" is significantly less common in words around breaks, except for at the start of lines. It's about 40% as common as expected, before both line breaks and text intrusions, and 60% as common after text intrusions. Similarly, the letter q is around 60% as common both before line breaks and text intrusions, but 19% as common after text intrusions. I believe that all of this is due to omitting those characters when needed to properly align the text. The letter k at 70% may also commonly be removed for abbreviation.
Observation 2: The letter "s" is about 3 times as common in words at the start of lines and both before and after drawings, and 63% more common at the end of lines. For words sandwiched between two drawings, it's 6 times more common. My guesses as to the meaning of this:
Observation 3: Words at line end and before text intrusions are shorter on average, by around 0.3 glyphs and 0.5 glyphs, respectively. There are also a lot of short words that seem to almost exclusively appear in these positions, like "sy", "oly", "oldy", "dy", "oky", "ldy", "ary", "lol", etc. My guess is that these words are either abbreviations or nonsense to pad for length.
Observation 4: This has been You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but words at the start of lines often have a "d" or "y" for padding if the words starts with "ch" or "sh", creating a lot of words that almost exclusively appear at line start. The word "sho" being a strange exception, and also a word that appears primarily at the start of lines. "d" is also usable in place of "s" for most of the words where it seems to be used as padding.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I hypothesized that this would mess with statistics around drawings and line breaks. I filtered by lines not at the top or bottom of a paragraph, looked at a bunch of statistics, and made some observations.
Observation 1: The letter "e" is significantly less common in words around breaks, except for at the start of lines. It's about 40% as common as expected, before both line breaks and text intrusions, and 60% as common after text intrusions. Similarly, the letter q is around 60% as common both before line breaks and text intrusions, but 19% as common after text intrusions. I believe that all of this is due to omitting those characters when needed to properly align the text. The letter k at 70% may also commonly be removed for abbreviation.
Observation 2: The letter "s" is about 3 times as common in words at the start of lines and both before and after drawings, and 63% more common at the end of lines. For words sandwiched between two drawings, it's 6 times more common. My guesses as to the meaning of this:
- Based on varying decreases in the counts of words like "al", "ar", "ol", "or", and "aiin", with increases to words starting with "s", it could be a padding character.
- "sh" is 38% as common as expected at the end of lines and 61% as common before text intrusions, so part of it could be abbreviation.
- One of the s-words may serve to mark the start of a sentence.
Observation 3: Words at line end and before text intrusions are shorter on average, by around 0.3 glyphs and 0.5 glyphs, respectively. There are also a lot of short words that seem to almost exclusively appear in these positions, like "sy", "oly", "oldy", "dy", "oky", "ldy", "ary", "lol", etc. My guess is that these words are either abbreviations or nonsense to pad for length.
Observation 4: This has been You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but words at the start of lines often have a "d" or "y" for padding if the words starts with "ch" or "sh", creating a lot of words that almost exclusively appear at line start. The word "sho" being a strange exception, and also a word that appears primarily at the start of lines. "d" is also usable in place of "s" for most of the words where it seems to be used as padding.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)
