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The Impossibility of Double Gallows

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• The Impossibility of Double Gallows

• The Impossibility of Double Gallows

  Emma May Smith > 16-01-2016, 10:09 PM

  I've been playing around with some bigram tables lately, and though I haven't yet seen anything shockingly new, there is something reassuringly old which keeps pressing me to explain. Namely, that no two gallows characters can appear next to one another in the text. It likely seems as though such an obvious fact needs no explanation, but I feel it does.
  
  By gallows characters I mean [k, t, f, p] and their bench versions [ckh, cth, cfh, cph]. Despite the 8x8 possible combinations for such characters, they basically do not exist in pairs. There are, as far as I can find, six exceptions in the whole text. Not six combinations, but six, individual, once occurring combinations of any two gallows characters.
  
  Why is this important and why does it need explaining? Firstly, it is important because the way characters fit together should belie the linguistic facts underlying the text (assuming the text is linguistic, naturally). Next, because the statistics for gallows combinations are so stark, there being next to none.
  
  Most combinations of characters appear a few times even if they do not normally go together. So [ak], a combination which should not ideally exist, gets about 40 hits; [oq] gets 20; [lm] gets about 10; and [en] 15. At these levels the stats are basically noise. They are likely no more than writing and reading errors, or missplit words. Even if they encode something genuine it cannot be a main part of the underlying language.
  
  Yet, even with the possibility of errors, two gallows characters do not occur next to one another. Why? Well, here's my guess and what it means.
  
  1) The gallows characters are distinct in essential form from all other characters. Many characters begin with a small round or straight stroke (such as what Cham's stroke theory is based on) and can be easily confused: [ei] for [a], [ch] for [ee], [r] for [s], among others. But gallows characters all begin with a long straight stroke above the line which only they use. Although the writer may have mistakenly written one gallows character when he meant another—and a reader likewise—they can only ever be confused for each other and never a non-gallows character.
  
  2) Although gallows often come at the beginning of words they almost never come at the end. Even when a space between two words is ambiguous, the joining of two neighbouring words will not bring together two gallows. The reader cannot misread their way to double gallows.
  
  3) The gallows all take the same place within the structure of a word. One loop or two, one leg or two, bench or no bench, no variation in their shape causes them to take a different place or makes it possible for them to occur together.
  
  4) The structure of words is strict and variations simply don't occur all that often. This is a point made by researchers a long time ago but bears repeating. Characters fall into classes according to their distribution and role within words. They don't move about and do different things (I can only think of one possible exception to this). This is something fundamental to what they represent.
  
  5) All the gallows must thus share some feature which puts them into the same class and makes them work in similar ways.
  
  6) Their similar role and their similar appearance suggests that whomever invented the Voynich script did so with a clear understanding of not only how the underlying language worked, but also how languages in general work. The gallows itself as a character category is also a linguistic category.
  
  7) Further, it is most likely a phonological category, which would explain why two sounds cannot appear together and why they must appear in certain places within words. Given the constraints on possible 'sound sets' within any language, and the number of distinct characters, the gallows as a feature can only represent a handful of phonological features.

• RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows

  Anton > 16-01-2016, 10:54 PM

  Emma, could you please list those occurrences of two-gallows combinations? Could not find them off-hand with Job's tool.

• RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows

  Emma May Smith > 16-01-2016, 11:23 PM

  [otkchedy] on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [tcfhy] on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [chpkcheos] on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [ckhcfhhy] on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [cthcthey] on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (this is a split gallows, so may not be correct as a reading)
  [ycphko] on f52r

• RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows

  Anton > 16-01-2016, 11:42 PM

  Thank you.
  
  So, plain gallows can go one after another, but at the same time that's extremely rare. Something to think of.

• RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows

  Emma May Smith > 16-01-2016, 11:50 PM

  There is something like 20,000 occurrences of gallows characters. That's an average of one for every two words in the manuscript. Six instances of them being adjacent is practically none. Somebody else can do the maths.

• RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows

  Anton > 17-01-2016, 02:35 PM

  In the cases such as these, where we fail to understand the common practice (of plain text-to-Voynichese translation) it is not the common practice, but the "exceptions" what probably may enlighten us, if we accept that those "exceptions" are there for a reason.
  
  That two gallows can be in a row is not something we should neglect because it happens rarely. On the contrary, it is a most valuable piece of information, adding to our understanding what behavior gallows can exhibit and what they can't.
  
  I'll try to clarify this consideration with a simple example. Consider the system of Roman digits and imagine that some practical book (mentioning many quantities by way of numbers) is using that to represent numbers. How often will you encounter the sequence such as MM? Probably only once or twice in the book, just because 2000 is not some quantity that is very frequently used in the book, it deals mostly with units, tens and hundreds. Yet MM is a perfectly valid sequence in the Roman system.
  
  Off-hand, what does the fact that two gallows can follow in a row within a single vord allow us to conclude? It allows us to conclude, at least, that:
  
  a gallow is not a simple operator applied to the subsequent string of characters;
  OR
  at least, that it is not such operator in all cases;
  OR
  if a gallows is an operator, then such operators can be nested.
  
  Not very definite, you see, but still better than nothing. And a good piece of information to combine with my idea of gallows' coverage (see the adjacent thread about gallows). BTW, in the Recipe section where the distance between the lines is so small, it becomes much less propable that "coverage" is idle embellishment and more probable that it is introduced on purpose.

• RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows

  david > 17-01-2016, 06:19 PM

  The trouble with that, Anton, is that we always know that Roman numerals can be combined in any order.
  
  We cannot assume that with the glyphs.
  
  A better example may be that of, say, Hebrew, where letters can double as numbers. So letters can be combined to form words; or they can be combined to form numbers, which in turn can double as words. (that's the basis of numerology, by the way). It seems that sometimes you get words that don't mean anything, but they are in fact numbers. Ancient Greek had the same system for a while.
  
  But I don't agree that Voynichese incorporates this system into its grammar - glyph placement is too non-trivial for the language to be gemetrian. Also, most gematrian languages (ie Hebrew) include a special marker when a word is actually a number.
  
  So I tend to agree with Emma here - the number of occurrences appear to be statistically insignificant.
  
  Emma, you said:
  
  
  

  Quote:6) Their similar role and their similar appearance suggests that whomever invented the Voynich script did so with a clear understanding of not only how the underlying language worked, but also how languages in general work. The gallows itself as a character category is also a linguistic category. [emphasis mine]

  What did you mean by that?

• RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows

  Anton > 17-01-2016, 06:46 PM

  (17-01-2016, 06:19 PM)David Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The trouble with that, Anton, is that we always know that Roman numerals can be combined in any order.
  
  We cannot assume that with the glyphs.

  
  I did not mean to introduce a direct parallel with the Voynichese glyphs, just to illustrate the consideration that a system well may yield rare occasions as well as frequent occasions. An occurrence cannot be neglected based on its rarity, its fact is there and must be incorporated into the explanation.
  
  BTW, the Roman numerals cannot be combined in any order. E.g. "IM" would be invalid.

• RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows

  david > 17-01-2016, 06:56 PM

  Quote:BTW, the Roman numerals cannot be combined in any order. E.g. "IM" would be invalid.

  That reflects modern usage. The Romans themselves never seemed to have made a clear system.
  BTW, IM was used You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: It should also be noted that the Romans themselves never wrote M for 1000, but instead wrote (I) for , (I)(I) for , etc., and also occasionally wrote IM, IIM, etc. (Menninger 1992, p. 281; Cajori 1993, p. 32).
  
  
  Whilst I agree in general terms on your rarity argument, I remind you we are talking about a handwritten manuscript from a time when spelling was not generally standardised. Six errors in over 38,000 words, when no apparent pattern can be discerned between those six words, can be put down to simple scribal error.

• RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows

  Emma May Smith > 18-01-2016, 08:08 PM

  Quote:

  Quote:6) Their similar role and their similar appearance suggests that whomever invented the Voynich script did so with a clear understanding of not only how the underlying language worked, but also how languages in general work. The gallows itself as a character category is also a linguistic category. [emphasis mine]

  What did you mean by that?

  
  What I mean is that the inventor of the script (and I do believe it is invented) had an understanding of the sounds of language and how to categorize them. The categories they knew may not have been the same as the ones we have today, but would find parallels in them.
  
  Researching medieval "linguistics" (not a term they would have known or used) is something I mean to do given the time and opportunity. There were likely only a few models in use at the time for understanding speech sounds, so it should be possible to gain an insight into their thought.
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