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MSI at last!
- MSI at last!
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RE: MSI at last!
pfeaster > 08-09-2024, 11:21 PM
(08-09-2024, 06:21 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.1) In the Voynichese sequence revealed on 1r, Marci interprets EVA [an] and [in] as single characters instead of bigrams. I'd love to hear from the data-gatherers among you how this interpretation might impact analytics!
Comparing the c/d and d/e glyphs, I wonder whether they may simply be [r] and [n] rather than [r] and [an], something like this:
There's a lot of variation in how the "base" stroke of [r] and [n] was written in Voynichese, and although this curvature wouldn't exactly be typical, it doesn't strike me as falling wholly outside the range of plausible forms either (especially if we're dealing with someone who's just guessing about what the glyphs "should" look like, just as we are ourselves). Meanwhile I'm having trouble identifying anything here with the [a] part of [an].
The f/g glyph looks more convincingly like [in], although it's hard to rule out the rare [u]. If it is [in], which seems more likely than [u], it's interesting that the [n] is drawn with a very short backwards curve this time, while the other [n] associated with c/d is drawn with a relatively long one. -
RE: MSI at last!
ReneZ > 09-09-2024, 01:58 AM
My guess for the presence of three columns on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the following.
Indeed, it looks like an attempt to break the cipher assuming a simple substitution.
I would guess that the leftmost two columns represents the first attempt. Then, after a while, Marci (if it is indeed him) realised that this attempt does not really work, and he prepared a second Latin alphabet for his next attempt. But he never got to the point where he could come up with a better attempt.
That's how we are now left with these three columns. -
RE: MSI at last!
Aga Tentakulus > 09-09-2024, 07:45 AM
@Lisa + Rene
I'll have to ask about that.
What brings you to Marci and not to Tepenece. This would probably be the first port of call, as the name is already there.
Do you have such good comparison material? It's not exactly a font, just an alphabet. -
RE: MSI at last!
Koen G > 09-09-2024, 08:33 AM
Aga: you can read Lisa's argumentation in her blog post: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Rene: I'm not sure about that, the offset is suspicious. It would also mean that Marci decided to keep cramming his attempts into the margin of the actual MS, while paper should have been readily available to him. -
RE: MSI at last!
Aga Tentakulus > 09-09-2024, 10:07 AM
Thanks Koen, I thought I had already opened it.
I had a quick look at it, I'll have a closer look later.
First of all.
The character for ‘z’ looks to me like a variant 1 of the three. -
RE: MSI at last!
ReneZ > 09-09-2024, 01:32 PM
(09-09-2024, 08:33 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Rene: I'm not sure about that, the offset is suspicious. It would also mean that Marci decided to keep cramming his attempts into the margin of the actual MS, while paper should have been readily available to him.
But that would be an argument against there to be any list at all...
When the first (or the whole) list was written, I suspect that plenty of scribbling on paper would have been done in any case.
But there is an even more interesting question. Just how good/bad is this attempt? Does it convert any Voynich MS text to anything reasonable?
I have no time to check now, but perhaps someone is already looking at this. -
RE: MSI at last!
Koen G > 09-09-2024, 02:23 PM
(09-09-2024, 01:32 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But that would be an argument against there to be any list at all...
When the first (or the whole) list was written, I suspect that plenty of scribbling on paper would have been done in any case.
Good point - why did he feel the need to write on the actual MS in the first place? I would think that at this time in history and for a man of his position, paper would have always been on hand. If you are right that he probably practiced on paper, then why write on the MS if it is just an attempt? I find it all very confusing.
I tried some quick replacements using the columns, but it seems to be a case of garbage in - garbage out. There are manby ways to implement them though, so somebody else should try as well. One impression I get is that this operation often results in alphabetically sorted frequences. Maybe he was attempting to sort letters by their position in the word? -
RE: MSI at last!
LisaFaginDavis > 09-09-2024, 02:40 PM
And where's [k]? And why use the lost "capitals" for x and z? So many questions about this. -
RE: MSI at last!
pfeaster > 09-09-2024, 04:17 PM
(09-09-2024, 02:23 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Good point - why did he feel the need to write on the actual MS in the first place? I would think that at this time in history and for a man of his position, paper would have always been on hand. If you are right that he probably practiced on paper, then why write on the MS if it is just an attempt? I find it all very confusing.
One possibility we might consider is that the vertical column of Voynichese glyphs on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was written by a different person -- and at a different, earlier time -- than the two columns of Latin characters. It may even originally have served a function similar to the other vertical glyph columns found on f49v, f66r, and f76r, whatever that was -- the main difference being that it's written to the right of the main text block rather than to the left.
Someone (Marci?) might have seen a column of glyphs on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -- with a large red glyph or symbol at the top -- and observed that it contained roughly the right number of entries to be an alphabetic key.
The two columns of Latin characters could then represent two hypotheses:
(1 = Left) That the large red symbol was not part of the cipher alphabet, so that the first "small" glyph corresponded to a, the next to b, etc.
(2 = Right) That the large red symbol was part of the cipher alphabet, so that it corresponded to a, the first "small" glyph to b, and so on.
Among other things, this explanation could help account for the presence in the column of what look like very rare glyphs -- i.e., they weren't originally written there to be part of an alphabetic key, and were only interpreted that way at some other, later point. -
RE: MSI at last!
Koen G > 09-09-2024, 04:35 PM
I like that idea, Patrick. It would explain a number of things.
If suspected Marci wrote the Latin characters in the 1600's, should his ink have a different composition than that used in the early 1400's? Should it show up in the MSI?