• Options
• Login
• Desktop Style

Opinions on: line as a functional unit

• Index

  • The Voynich Ninja
  • Voynich Research
  • Analysis of the text
  • Opinions on: line as a functional unit
• Opinions on: line as a functional unit

• Opinions on: line as a functional unit

  Kaybo > 9 hours ago

  As a noob I looked at the manuscript and found some words that are nearly only exclusive at the line start like dshedy, ycheor, ycheol, dchedy, ychain. I also found some nearly exclusive at the line end like chary, opam, orom, okam (interestingly some of these in front of line cuts by plants), but I need to look at that in more detail to say something. 
  
  However, the line start words seem very convincing for me. Also this words do not include the paragraph words, so they are not at the start of a paragraph. Also other have found similar patterns bevor  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  How can that be explained? Is every line the start of a new sentence? But how to fill the line that you have such a smooth ending? Or does the text maybe contain filler words at the start and the end? Or words that starts the coding of a line? 
  
  What are your thoughts and ideas about that?

• RE: Opinions on: line as a functional unit

  qoltedy > 1 hour ago

  (9 hours ago)Kaybo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How can that be explained? Is every line the start of a new sentence? But how to fill the line that you have such a smooth ending? Or does the text maybe contain filler words at the start and the end? Or words that starts the coding of a line? 
  
  What are your thoughts and ideas about that?

  
  There are a few possible explanations:
  
  1.) the text is meaningless and the author is using filler words, which would be easy if the entire text is filler words. However, the "meaningless" interpretation has its own logical inconsistencies that make it, in my opinion unlikely.
  
  2.) the text is "partially meaningless", as in, there are SOME filler words they use to round out a sentence/line. Again, seems hard to believe the text is only partially meaningful. Would make sense with "glossolalia" interpretations. Which again I think are unlikely given a variety of inconsistencies with other things we know
  
  3.) the text is meaningful, and each line really is a sentence/complete thought.
  
  There are a few categories of this:
  3a.) the text is copied from an earlier script, and that earlier script was designed/reworded specifically to have every line act as a functional unit/sentence. This is logically consistent with much of what we know about the manuscript, especially with those who posit it's copied from an earlier text
  
  3b.) the text was written in a stream of consciousness manner, but some property of the script/language/constructed language, allows for the enhanced ability for the author to estimate the exact space they will need to compose a sentence, and for reasons unknown, they had a strong preference and ability to write 1 sentence per line. This one would be quite extraordinary if it were the case, but in theory possible with constructed language hypotheses, if the constructed language has characteristics which allow for this sort of "on the spot estimation" of the space they need to finish up a thought. If this were the case, it may imply the text/meaning is much denser than previously imagined, since longer thoughts/sentences are easier to estimate the exact space you need.
  
  Besides these options, it's quite hard to imagine any explanation which fits what we see in the manuscript. If text flowed from one line to the next, without lines acting as natural sentence enders/break points, it's really quite hard to imagine how that would work. Would words that end sentences act as a "\n" newline character, but only sometimes? That really doesn't make sense. 
  
  Of course there could be another explanation we haven't thought of, but most likely, given the abundance of evidence we have that the text is meaningful, it's probably 3a or 3b if I had to guess. My money being on 3b for a variety of reasons.

• RE: Opinions on: line as a functional unit

  oshfdk > 1 hour ago

  (1 hour ago)qoltedy Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Besides these options, it's quite hard to imagine any explanation which fits what we see in the manuscript. If text flowed from one line to the next, without lines acting as natural sentence enders/break points, it's really quite hard to imagine how that would work. Would words that end sentences act as a "\n" newline character, but only sometimes? That really doesn't make sense. 
  
  Of course there could be another explanation we haven't thought of, but most likely, given the abundance of evidence we have that the text is meaningful, it's probably 3a or 3b if I had to guess. My money being on 3b for a variety of reasons.

  
  There are many other possible explanations:
  - the sequences at the ends of the lines are abbreviations, to avoid splitting words (or maybe the manuscript is enciphered and the nature of the cipher doesn't allow splitting words at all)
  - the words are actually split between lines, and special cipher symbols are used to indicate that the continuation of the encoding is on the next line, and other symbols at the beginning of a line indicate a continuation from the previous line
  - lines often contain lists of examples and whenever there is little space left and it's not very important to continue expanding the list, the line is terminated with something like "etc.", "and so on". In which case the next line would often start with something like "on the other hand", "however", etc.
  - there are several possible ways to encode a sequence (one-to-many cipher) and naturally when the space is constrained (near the end of a line or otherwise), shorter sequences are preferred, while at the beginning of a line the longer sequences are more frequent.
  
  I'm not sure any of these explanations is very good, but over the years there have been proposed dozens of different plausible explanations for LAAFU. The question as I see it is not "how is it possible at all", but "which of many explanations is the right one".

• RE: Opinions on: line as a functional unit

  nablator > 54 minutes ago

  Any explanation of how lines start/end should also take into account "vertical pair" preferences.
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
• Next Oldest Next Newest