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Repetition of words
- Repetition of words
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RE: Repetition of words
Mark Knowles > 26-09-2025, 09:43 AM
(26-09-2025, 08:13 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If we are talking about a fake cipher (a text with no meaning), it makes no sense to write such a quantity of identical words together.
I don't believe it is a fake cipher. I think it is a real cipher with large number of filler words. I think words in the Voynich fall into one of two categories: "real words" and "filler words". If this is the case and the Voynich is written in a European language such as Latin then any words that are repeated consecutively have a very very high probability of being filler words as such repetitions appear to be very very rare in European texts. So removing all consecutively repeated words from the text until there are no repeated words in the text ought to leave a text with different statistical properties. I don't think this process will remove all the filler words, but a large number of them. -
RE: Repetition of words
Mark Knowles > 26-09-2025, 09:49 AM
(26-09-2025, 08:13 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would also make a point here, since we are talking about repetitions, regarding character repetition. It is extremely rare to find languages with such long consecutive repetitions of characters (e.g. ???ooooooooolar (if it is really a word, so werid with the dots after and before...), eeee appears in eight words, hhh in five words, rrr in one word). While word repetition may sometimes be stylistic, character repetition within words makes the word itself different. I know I could write difeeeeeeeeerent and you will still understand it as different, as if I were screaming, but this is a modern style, and I doubt it was intended that way in the 15th century.
Some of the symbol repeats such as the ccc could well be individual glyphs as we see glyphs like this in diplomatic ciphers of the period. Other repeats could indicate that they are filler words. -
RE: Repetition of words
Jorge_Stolfi > 26-09-2025, 10:17 AM
(26-09-2025, 08:13 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(e.g. ???ooooooooolar (if it is really a word, so werid with the dots after and before...)
Maybe something like "....oooooom many padme hum" "...wooooooosh" or "heeeeeeeere is Jimmy"...
If so, it would imply that o is a sound that can be sustained, like a vowel, sibilant, or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ...
(26-09-2025, 08:13 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.eeee appears in eight words, hhh in five words
The pair ee is often mis-stranscribed as Ch and vice-versa. Could that be the explanation for those cases?
All the best, --jorge -
RE: Repetition of words
quimqu > 26-09-2025, 12:06 PM
(26-09-2025, 10:17 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The pair ee is often mis-stranscribed as Ch and vice-versa. Could that be the explanation for those cases?
Not all of them:
![[Image: cqfEc17.png]](https://i.imgur.com/cqfEc17.png)
[size=1][font='Proxima Nova Regular', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]![[Image: HblPNij.png]](https://i.imgur.com/HblPNij.png)
[/font][/size]
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RE: Repetition of words
Jorge_Stolfi > 26-09-2025, 03:13 PM
(26-09-2025, 12:06 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Not all of them:
Well, ahem, aham, I would say that the first example was originally Chee, but the ligature of the Ch faded almost to invisibility (you can still see a very faint trace of it), so much so that it was missed by the Retracer.
As for the second example, it could indeed be ee + ee. Or it could be a little more extreme case of the above, where the original ligature of the Ch has, by now, faded to complete invisibility...
(And I am quite sure that the second example was fully retraced, because the plume of the r is not a quick and tapering counterclockwise swirl of the pen, but a slow and broad clockwise (re)tracing of it.)
All the best, --jorge -
RE: Repetition of words
Eiríkur > 26-09-2025, 06:26 PM
(26-09-2025, 08:13 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The author should be aware not to repeat words excessively, since words repeated too closely can lead one to think the text is fake. I mean, imagine writing and inventing words at the same time; consciously or not, you’re not going to repeat the same word twice in a row.
The thing that stood out to me the most in 2025 dive into the ms was the wildness of some of the densely repeated sections. I'm stumped. I just don't have an idea. I feel that they should have been identified and not written onto the page, but if it is being copied, and in some cases copied by scribes who can't read the it...I just don't know. What would allow *you* to leave these in? I'd have to be certain that a smart person would not get to examine arbitrary pages. This creates a new constraint that the MS must never be examined by people with education and time. I'm not making an assumption that these repeats tell us that there is no meaning. Maybe it's a completely different encoding steganographic map. (Low information content, I think.)
Okay, maybe there's a good explanation for the repeated words and you can just give that to the smart person who notices them. That's not at all satisfying to me.
Before I was recognizing most of the common glyphs, the repetitions didn't stand out to me. I located them by reading the ZL transcription file with a program that I wrote. I wonder if there are other, undiscovered, oddities like the repeats, the line structure, Nick Pelling's Neal keys. and Gallows-coverage, etc. I can't think of a general way to discover such. -
RE: Repetition of words
Mark Knowles > 26-09-2025, 08:27 PM
The laziness of the author is a question which arises when talking about repeated words. The purpose of filler words are to confuse and make it difficult for the decipherer to distinguish between the real words and the filler words. Producing filler words however requires effort. Ideally the encipherer wants to generate filler words with as little effort involved, but which also most effectively confuse the decipherer. These two goals act in opposition often. I think the repetitive nature of some of the filler text is as a result of the laziness of the author. I hope to exploit the author's laziness to distinguish between the filler words and real words. (Also it is in the interest of the author that when they read back the text they can spot which are filler words and which are real words easily, however this can be in opposition to the goal of making it as difficult as possible for the decipherer to read). -
RE: Repetition of words
Barbrey > 27-09-2025, 12:50 AM
I think Mark might be right and I look forward to his results. I did want to contribute a few observations about repeated words that I’ve seen in these manuscripts. I’ve broached a lot of unfamiliar territory since first reading Mary D’Imperio! The occult and alchemy are two examples.
I noticed in the Picatrix for talisman making that you’d be instructed to recite a prayer when making one, and these prayers often consisted of repeated words, probably nonsense words. Hermetic texts did this too, a lot of times a lot of vowels together. I suspect this was to help with religious fervour but on the printed page it looks like howling.
I’ve never read The Book of the Holy Trinity (alchemy text contemporaneous with VMS) because it’s not in English. However, I’ve read a lot about it and extracts from it. Apparently, the author would write fairly succinctly, relatively speaking, in Latin and then fill big paragraphs in Middle High German with gibberish, including repeated words.
So maybe your comparisons are to the wrong books, Mark! I’m 90% kidding, but I still retain hope the The Book of the Holy Trinity will be translated one day and I can take a proper look. -
RE: Repetition of words
oaken > 28-09-2025, 10:01 PM
(27-09-2025, 12:50 AM)Barbrey Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I noticed in the Picatrix for talisman making that you’d be instructed to recite a prayer when making one, and these prayers often consisted of repeated words, probably nonsense words. Hermetic texts did this too, a lot of times a lot of vowels together. I suspect this was to help with religious fervour but on the printed page it looks like howling.
In the era before widespread clocks and watches, incantations also served as one of the few available methods of time keeping. -
RE: Repetition of words
RadioFM > 29-09-2025, 03:34 PM