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A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
- A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
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RE: A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
MarcoP > 05-09-2021, 07:16 PM
(26-07-2021, 07:48 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.qo appears as an unique vord 29 times. However, almost all vords prefixed by q appear elsewhere in the corpus without that prefix. No label uses that prefix.
(26-07-2021, 08:02 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Actually there are a few labels starting with q, 66r for example.
ZL_ivtff_1r.txt lists the following q-labels:
<f66r.3,+L0> qo[r:n]
<f66r.9,+L0> qotesy
<f66r.13,+L0> qokal
<f66r.14,+L0> qolsa
<f67r2.52,@Ls> qotoear
<f73v.21,&Lz> <!09:00>qokeoly
<f75v.25,+Ln> qokal
<f75v.33,+Ln> qoted
<f75v.56,+Lt> qotedy
<f76r.10,*L0> q
<fRos.157,+L0> qokal
<f89r1.2,@Lf> qkol
Most of them are disputable, as they are not attached to images. But at least the qokeoly nymph in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. seems to be unequivocal. -
RE: A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
Dobri > 04-04-2025, 05:34 PM
(05-03-2017, 12:13 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.qo appears as an unique vord 29 times.
Actually, qo appears as a distinct vord 50 times if counting it also at the beginning of a new line.
This is one more example of a divisibility by 5 or 10 as discussed in the thread You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -
RE: A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
Eiríkur > 01-07-2025, 02:05 AM
I find this really striking when I'm looking at the text. It's even weirder than the copying with occasional permutations or errors. It's like a Cambrian Explosion of mutations. My weak guess is that this is a behavior pattern of one of the scribes. I do hope we learn something. At one point, I saw something (I must find this spot again) that looked as though the size of the copy-buffer shrank below the size of a typical word, down to the size of a prefix or suffix or syllable even smaller. This made me think of the process as fractally self-similar, it could go all the way down into the ligatures or combined glyphs or even what we describe as single glyphs, but that can't be. I just can't imagine people behaving like broken robots. My first-draft code that looked at this did a "for each space-delimited word on the page, look for that string in the page-as-one-string." That led to finding words that can be prefixes, or suffixes. Which is old news, but it was interesting to see it in this context. I don't seem to believe that this process is 100% of what causes the Maybe I should regenerate the results and stare at them some more. I didn't really know where to go from there because tracking a word through permutations and then showiing it as a sub-word prefix or suffix would be harder and it's hard to see what we'd learn. There'd have to be a lot of threshold-setting. -
RE: A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
Jorge_Stolfi > 01-07-2025, 02:52 PM
About my model for Voynichese words: here are some notes I collected back in 2004 or so, which may not be on my website yet because I did not get around to put them in a presentable format.
To begin, some digraph frequency tables. (I suppose that many have posted similar data, but whatever). The first two tables give the next- and prev-glyph frequencies in the text; that is, taking into account the frequency of each word in the text. The other two tables give the same prev- and next-glyph statistics for the lexicon; that is, each distinct word is counted once.
Either way, it is evident that some characters have similar frequencies. As others have observed, p and f have similar prev-glyph frequencies as t and k (with both pairings seeming equally valid) but different next-glyph frequencies, that make it seem that p = te and f = ke or vice-versa. One should check whether the hooked-arm variants of p and f are different from the straight-arm variants. On the other hand, cth, ckh, cph, and cfh have similar frequencies on both sides.
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RE: A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
Jorge_Stolfi > 01-07-2025, 02:58 PM
And here is my structural model for Voynichese words. The distribution of the O elements in the word is still missing, sorry.
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RE: A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
Jorge_Stolfi > 01-07-2025, 03:17 PM
By the way, IIRC the tables above were computed from Takeshi's transcription, or maybe from a "consensus" or "majority vote" version derived from the main transcriptions. Either way, the source file is likely to contain many errors by the transcribers and probably by the Scribe, such as r <-> s and a <-> o. I believe those errors do not affect the main conclusions from the tables and the validity of the model. But, if you can, do check them with your preferred transcription.
All the best, --jorge -
RE: A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
Koen G > 01-07-2025, 09:32 PM
If an extra curve on a gallow can encode EVA-e, then might the same be true for Sh compared to ch? So Sh = che and She = chee etc? -
RE: A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
Bluetoes101 > 01-07-2025, 11:32 PM
(01-07-2025, 09:32 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If an extra curve on a gallow can encode EVA-e, then might the same be true for Sh compared to ch? So Sh = che and She = chee etc?
In my limited experience with these characters, they are the most.. difficult to stuff in a box(?)
On top of these variants (if they are) you have "benched-gallows" and the fact the start of "ch"/"sh" do not act as a "curve" as much as other easy to label "curves" (you have to discount "d" for this to make sense).
There are a multitude of ways of looking at this, and no teacher to give us a gold star if right..
For example I hypothesised that maybe if "c-GALLOWS-h" makes up a ligature, maybe "sh" does also, following general "curve" to "other stuff" rules, maybe "c(middle thing)h" (sh) also makes something that work wouldn't otherwise, like a "curve" to "backslash"(inrjmlv) followed by a curve.
The issue is that while some ideas seem more well thought out than others, both are essentially shouting at water and telling it "you're blue! (probably)" without any feedback.
Anyway, I also think "She = chee etc?" is a likely a theory as any with reason, the tricky thing with "what follows what" is that you essentially have 2 parts to letters to understand them via association with other available context, left side (start) --->s and right side (end) h <---, then you can start to try figure out "what follows what", though if its hiding in the middle, it really is "shouting at water".
Also thanks for sharing all this Jorge, my brain is completely fried today but I look forward to going over it with a clear head tomorrow. -
RE: A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
ReneZ > 02-07-2025, 12:41 AM
(01-07-2025, 09:32 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If an extra curve on a gallow can encode EVA-e, then might the same be true for Sh compared to ch? So Sh = che and She = chee etc?
Interestingly, this works partially, but not consistently.
When going from Herbal-A to Pharma-A, we get an increase in cheo and a reduction in sho, but this does not carry over into the other combinations. -
RE: A brief summary of Voynichese spelling and grammar
Bluetoes101 > 02-07-2025, 01:05 AM
(02-07-2025, 12:41 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You end up running into "cheeo" however, which is fairly common. Why have that 3 times on page 230 if you shortened it to "sheo" to save time/space a whole manuscript ago.(01-07-2025, 09:32 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If an extra curve on a gallow can encode EVA-e, then might the same be true for Sh compared to ch? So Sh = che and She = chee etc?
Interestingly, this works partially, but not consistently.
When going from Herbal-A to Pharma-A, we get an increase in cheo and a reduction in sho, but this does not carry over into the other combinations.