nickpelling > 12-02-2017, 01:11 AM
(12-02-2017, 01:04 AM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(12-02-2017, 12:21 AM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If this is correct for all lines (not just paragraph-initial and page-initial lines), then it strongly suggests that (a) it is not the first word in a line that gets shortened into some second word by having some putative prefix removed and/or by autocopying, but instead (b) that the first word is typically longer than all the other words because an entirely separate process is going on there, one that prepends an extra letter to the first word of each line.
It doesn't have to be every line, though, does it? Even every other line having an added character would up the average.
KnoxMix > 12-02-2017, 02:38 AM
stellar > 12-02-2017, 03:30 AM
(12-02-2017, 02:38 AM)KnoxMix Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The average length of line-initial words excluding paragraph-initial words is shorter than expected if the lines were wrapped. If they were not wrapped, it is suspiciously co-incidental that second words are short on average.
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See the bottom of this page for average word lengths on unwrapped lines.
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Torsten > 12-02-2017, 06:18 AM
(12-02-2017, 12:21 AM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(11-02-2017, 12:34 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This observations can be explained as an unintended side effect of the autocopying method[font=Trebuchet MS]. The source for the first word in each line could only be found within the previous lines. Since the first and the last word in each line are easy to spot, the most obvious way is to pick them as a source for the generation of a word at the beginning or at the end of a line. For the second word it is also possible to select the first word as a source. Since the first word in a line usually has a prefix the simplest change is to remove this prefix.[/font]
But isn't there a completely different statistical result (I vaguely recall Mark Perakh mentioning it some years ago, but I suspect that even by then it was a commonplace) that says that the first word of each line is on average slightly longer than all the other words in the line, not just the second word?
The proposal that this kind of thing holds true for the first word of a page or paragraph is now well-established in Voynich analysis, but less so for non-paragraph-initial and non-page-initial words.
If this is correct for all lines (not just paragraph-initial and page-initial lines), then it strongly suggests that (a) it is not the first word in a line that gets shortened into some second word by having some putative prefix removed and/or by autocopying, but instead (b) that the first word is typically longer than all the other words because an entirely separate process is going on there, one that prepends an extra letter to the first word of each line.
MarcoP > 12-02-2017, 01:58 PM
Torsten > 12-02-2017, 02:20 PM
(11-02-2017, 05:54 PM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's a good observation to be starting from. The implication is that at least some of the single characters before aiin at the start of a line are in some way nulls.
For me, the interesting question is whether the proportion of saiin to (non-s)aiin at the line start is the same as the proportion of aiin to (single-letter)aiin. If it is , it would give support to the suggestion that line-initial s- is a null.
Anton > 12-02-2017, 03:34 PM
Torsten > 12-02-2017, 04:29 PM
(12-02-2017, 01:58 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.About the “Autocopying hypothesis,” I see it as a special case of the “meaningless gibberish hypothesis”. Personally, being fond of medieval parallels, I find this hypothesis both uninteresting and anachronistic, but I think it is “not impossible” from a rational point of view. In my opinion, the only way to dismiss this idea is the convincing production of a meaningful reading of the content of the manuscript. Until we can read the manuscript, the “meaningless gibberish hypothesis” cannot be entirely dismissed.
Oocephalus > 12-02-2017, 06:35 PM
KnoxMix > 12-02-2017, 10:28 PM