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Your "research"
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Your "research"
Philipp Harland > 18-11-2025, 04:33 AM
Have you personally done any Voynich "research" (say frequency analysis/letter entropy analysis for 2 examples, but it could be anything) of your own? If so, what kinds of results did you yield/reproduce? For me it's no, but I'm just curious.
I don't know if there's already a thread about this, so let me know. -
RE: Your "research"
rikforto > 18-11-2025, 09:15 AM
I am working on what I'm terming "odd cases". There are some pretty good theories about what makes up a Voynich word, but some words are exceptional. The thing that got me interested in this was non-initial q. There so shockingly few of them that it seems like a rule that q must come first, but some 34 times, most of them unambiguous, the rule fails. I'm currently in a struggle with d, and I am trying to decide how to write up my findings. -
RE: Your "research"
dashstofsk > 19-11-2025, 11:27 AM
(18-11-2025, 04:33 AM)Philipp Harland Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Voynich "research" (say frequency analysis/letter entropy analysis for 2 examples, but it could be anything)
People have been doing this sort of thing for a long time.
Lists of of word frequencies, character frequencies, suffixes, prefixes, character pairs, word lengths, character and word positional frequencies, gallows occurrences, correlations between the languages clusters, character distributions across quire pages, distribution by illustration types and more have all been tabulated and analyzed, sometimes using deep computational algorithms. Comparison with almost every mediaeval language has also been tried.
All of this analysis seems to have done nothing more than highlighted that there are many anomalies in the text, and has left everyone baffled. -
RE: Your "research"
Koen G > 19-11-2025, 11:44 AM
(19-11-2025, 11:27 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.All of this analysis seems to have done nothing more than highlighted that there are many anomalies in the text, and has left everyone baffled.
That is a bit of a problem sometimes. What we often see is that people dedicate a lot of effort to really dig into a type of analysis. But when they share the results, only a few others are able to follow up and spot any issues, and even fewer are able/willing to pull this all together with different research to reach a broader conclusion.
Bowern and Lindemann did this for example in their You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which is often referred to and with good reason. It unites insights from various sources (see the extent of their literature) and tries to discern broader patterns in them. This kind of research is boring and relatively "altruistic", in the sense that rather than doing your own exciting research, you have to go through the work of others and synthesize it.
This is why keeping academics involved in Voynich research is essential: these papers help to construct and consolidate knowledge. These kinds of syntheses are what we need the most now, but they are usually less exciting and more difficult for amateurs to undertake. -
RE: Your "research"
Philipp Harland > 23-11-2025, 05:24 PM
(18-11-2025, 09:15 AM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am working on what I'm terming "odd cases". There are some pretty good theories about what makes up a Voynich word, but some words are exceptional. The thing that got me interested in this was non-initial q. There so shockingly few of them that it seems like a rule that q must come first, but some 34 times, most of them unambiguous, the rule fails. I'm currently in a struggle with d, and I am trying to decide how to write up my findings.
Well, what are your findings? Can you give a list of every "odd case" you've found? -
RE: Your "research"
rikforto > 23-11-2025, 06:51 PM
(23-11-2025, 05:24 PM)Philipp Harland Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, what are your findings? Can you give a list of every "odd case" you've found?
What my finding are, at present, is in no fit state to share!
It's funny you ask because I am literally this morning going through my notes and coming up with places I would like to canvass or recanvass for precedents and citations, as well as sketching the final argument I'd like to make about the first set of exceptional words I worked on. Not only can I not promise any quick turnaround on that project, I think there's no rush because any contribution from it will be fairly modest. I don't think anything I've found is exactly groundbreaking to people who have spent time with Voynich research, but I'd like to think I have some small insights about and useful synthesis of some recent work on Voynichese "morphology". If I'm ever sure that's what I have, I'll post it to this forum.
And yes, I am keeping an organized list of words that I think are odd (to my definitions of odd) and will absolutely provide it when I'm ready to defend all my choices. -
RE: Your "research"
rikforto > 23-11-2025, 07:05 PM
(23-11-2025, 06:51 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Read this thread to get some idea what "odd" words in VM are:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I'm not making a systematic study of his list, but you can imagine his wider work and that grammar specifically are very influential on my thoughts here, so I am in practice working through it
I had not seen ddssshx recently, but it causes me actual pain. There are so many seeming rules being broken there that I dare not approach it yet -
RE: Your "research"
JoJo_Jost > 23-11-2025, 07:58 PM
I deal with ligatures/berigraphs, especially words in the Voynich texts that can be identified relatively clearly with them (if they are Latin). Based on these words, you can “decipher” the surrounding glyphs—more or less statistically—i.e., assign them contexts of meaning. From this, you can derive patterns that can be synchronized with comparative texts to find more advanced patterns, which in turn can decipher other words. Unfortunately, this is very, very time-consuming. Especially since Latin is a very flexible language, which doesn't make it any easier.
I have already been able to deduce a few (meaningful) sentences (no eisegesis as far as reading is concerned), but that is still far too little—further side-by-side comparisons are needed to support the respective translations/meanings. It's a tedious puzzle with an uncertain outcome. But what I have so far at least allows me to conclude that something “could” work. However, there are also strange findings, such as the fact that the herbal text does not contain any recipes at all, but descriptions of the plant's vascular systems, which is very confusing. (in one possible pattern, at least)
In this respect, I have currently interrupted my investigation and am trying to clarify what these herbal texts contain using a completely different approach. I can't (yet) imagine this with the vascular systems. Although the theory arose here that the unusually detailed description of the roots might have something to do with the Balneological Section - but who nows...