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Cribs in the Voynich MS
- Cribs in the Voynich MS
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RE: Cribs in the Voynich MS
Mark Knowles > 08-05-2023, 04:24 PM
(08-05-2023, 03:55 PM)zobowiazanie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Also, the labels themselves are also very similar to each other.
Not all the labels in your list are very similar to the other ones.
I wonder if we removed from the list all words with a one symbol difference from another word in the list what it would look like.
So for example:
okol and otol are one symbol different from each other
There are definitely some words with quite distinctive spellings, maybe those are the "true" words or at least the ones we should be most interested in.
Also with specific names one would not expect them to occur very often throughout the Voynich manuscript, so if they are often repeated in the manuscript one might be suspicious of them. -
RE: Cribs in the Voynich MS
Mark Knowles > 08-05-2023, 04:37 PM
We can see examples of words with distinctive spellings in:
oar alys
ochoyk
saiir
oeesy
I suspect these kinds of words are the ones that we should be most interested in.
It is striking the number of words that start with an 'o' and the number of words for which the second letter is a 'k' or a 't'. Clearly a lot of words end with a '9' and many end with an '8' or '89'. It seems very common for the third letter to be a 'c' or possibly an 'o'. -
RE: Cribs in the Voynich MS
R. Sale > 08-05-2023, 06:05 PM
The purpose of this investigation is to verify or falsify. Things seem to be leaning toward the latter.
In the traditional listings, the four consecutive "Sa'd" designations are mansions #22-#25 in post #15 or mansions #23-#26 in post #6. If the first mansion of the paired EVA 's' listings corresponds to the first "Sa'd" listing, then at least there is some idea as to where the first of the VMs mansions (Mansion #1) might be - one way or the other.
In the listing of Agrippa's Tropical Mansions, each of the mansions is associated with a sign of the zodiac.
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Do the vords from the VMs mansions show up in the vords of the of the VMs zodiac pages in any kind of correspondence, or at all, for that matter? Or are we just floundering in Nick's 90+%? -
RE: Cribs in the Voynich MS
ReneZ > 09-05-2023, 07:28 AM
(08-05-2023, 02:17 PM)MichelleL11 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The medieval European understanding of the mansions of the moon names derive from the likely first translation into Spanish and Latin of the Arabic Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm as well as an insertion into Alfonso X's translation of the Ghayat of a discussion of talismans that include a name listing attributed to "Plinio." These two listings are present in what is known as the Picatrix (an amagamation of a range of disclosures about similar subject matter, collected by Alfonso's translators but a big part is the Ghayat).
Very interesting Michelle.
Now I was curious about the reference to Pliny, as he wrote 1000 years before the Ghayat seems to have been composed.
This page: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
presents a translation of Picatrix referring to the second Pliny, which confused me at first, but probably just is an unnecessary translation of his 'family name' Secundus. So it is Pliny the elder of course.
The list of names does not appear to be in book II -
RE: Cribs in the Voynich MS
Mark Knowles > 09-05-2023, 11:57 AM
(08-05-2023, 03:55 PM)zobowiazanie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Let's assume that the 28 labels around the central star on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are indeed related to the mansions of the moon. In that case I would be astonished, because some of the labels repeat themselves. The labels, along with their numbers of occurrences are as follows:
oar alys (1)
okcheys (1)
okeody (2)
okodchy (1)
okeod (3)
okeyd (1)
okeeydy (1)
otchy (1)
sarydy (1)
ykeody (1)
okolar (1)
saiir (1)
saral (1)
ykeydy (1)
oteol (1)
oteeys (1)
okeol (1)
otody (1)
okody (1)
ytody (1)
oeesy (1)
ytory (1)
ykeey (1)
ochoyk (1)
okeey sar (1)
It's really odd that okeod occurs 3 times and okeody twice if we consider that each mansion should have its unique name and star. Also, the labels themselves are also very similar to each other. This makes me think that when it came to picking the Voynichese labels the author was either drawing from a bucket of premade labels (and maybe sometimes mistakenly picked a label that was already taken?), or was just picking the next "closest" "free" label, whatever the criteria for those might've been. This is all assuming that a rather big Voynichese dictionary was involved, of course.
It might be interesting for these 28 words to calculate the sum of the Levenshtein distances to every other word in this list. Then sort the 28 words by this number with the greatest first. Then look to split this list into two those with high Levenshtein distance sums and those with low Levenshtein distance sums. Then focus effort on on those with high Levenshtein distance sums.
The interesting question is how easy it is to split the list into two. Is there are continuous descent in the figure for Levenshtein distance sum or is there a jump at some point? If there is a clear jump then it is easy to split the list into two.
(In practice whether one uses the Levenshtein Distance Sum or Levenshtein Distance Mean it makes little or no difference. Though to calculate the mean involves one more computation)
Levenshtein distance measures the similarity of the spelling of one Voynichese word to another Voynichese word. The mean Levenshtein distance measures the similarity of the spelling of one Voynichese word to a group of other Voynichese words. Calculating the mean Levenshtein Distance for each member of a group of Voynichese words to the other members of the group of Voynichese words allows one measure how similar each Voynichese word to the group as a whole. Sorting the group by the mean Levenshtein distance, allows to sort the members of the group in order of similarity to the group as a whole. This allows one to sort the group of Voynichese words by the distinctive down to the most homogeneous. Splitting the group into two by the mean Levenshtein distance allows one to split the group into distinctive Voynichese words and homogeneous monotonous words. Focusing on the distinctive Voynichese words I think is likely to be more profitable than the monotonous Voynichese words. The key difficulty is deciding where to make the split. A guide to that is looking at the graph of descending mean Levenshtein distances and deciding where the most obvious step change in the graph is; it would be preferable to have a formal reliable definition for how to locate that step change point. -
RE: Cribs in the Voynich MS
Scarecrow > 09-05-2023, 12:41 PM
Maybe not a crib, but some time ago, I had this idea that maybe the plants and pharma sections could be connected as pharma would use plants and it would be quite logic to refer to those plants already mentioned in the book, so I started to check vords from the pharma pages that would be found in plants section, and possibly only in those and found some, e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and F5r. In the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there is the vord "olsy" that is found only in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f5r.. it could be a proper name, could be something else that connects these pages, recipes or process or something.
There are some more of those, but never had time enough to follow up them properly. -
RE: Cribs in the Voynich MS
Antonio García Jiménez > 09-05-2023, 04:37 PM
Here are the mansions of the moon in the Catalan Atlas.
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In the fifteenth century talismanic magic no longer has the importance of previous centuries. There is a more scientific interest in pointing out the stars that are part of the mansions. In the middle of the century, the position of these stars was studied at the University of Salamanca. -
RE: Cribs in the Voynich MS
Emma May Smith > 09-05-2023, 06:39 PM
One thing which I recall noticing about the diagram on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is that two of the [keod] and both [keody] appear four labels apart. If the labels were on a cycle then there could be four lists of seven labels.
The goal then would be to find some reasoning behind each set of four. I couldn't find anything but maybe somebody will have better luck. (Also, the third [keod] being in a different set makes the pattern less good.) -
RE: Cribs in the Voynich MS
obelus > 09-05-2023, 10:32 PM
(09-05-2023, 11:57 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It might be interesting for these 28 words to calculate the sum of the Levenshtein distances to every other word in this list.
Following Mark Knowles' suggestion, mean edit distances to other labels within the set of 28 are plotted below:
Sharp discontinuities are not evident... but it still might be interesting.
(source transliteration IT2a-n.txt, which distinguishes okeo.dy from okeody) -
RE: Cribs in the Voynich MS
Mark Knowles > 09-05-2023, 11:00 PM
(09-05-2023, 10:32 PM)obelus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Yes. That is problematic. It means that either there is no real basis for partitioning the set of words into two. Or one needs to think of another different, though maybe related way of doing it.(09-05-2023, 11:57 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It might be interesting for these 28 words to calculate the sum of the Levenshtein distances to every other word in this list.
Sharp discontinuities are not evident... but it still might be interesting.
Looking at them one thing I do wonder about is length.
A typical Levenshtein distance calculation would find the two words "okol" and "okolokol" fairly different however in many ways they could be seen as much more similar.
For example I would be inclined to the view that
oar alys
Is mich more distinctive than
okchy sar
However clearly the standard mean Levenshtein distance doesn't agree.
In fact if I was manually sorting the list in order of what I think are the most distinctive I would come up with a fairly different order. I think this comes down to a bias towards longer words having greater mean Levenshtein distances. I am not quite sure how to modify the calculation to account for the word length question effectively.
I would regard
oeesa
And
ochoyk
As more distinctive.
Similarly the group of words starting something like
okchy ...
don't seem so distinctive.
Of course there is some degree of subjectiveness. Nevertheless it would be nice to find a function that better represents my assessment.