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About the generation of similar words
- About the generation of similar words
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RE: About the generation of similar words
quimqu > 11 hours ago
(Yesterday, 03:27 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
metric Voynich Natural lev≤1 giant ~80% 5–34% lev≤2 giant ~93–94% 58–82% segmentation 83–90% 0–60%
I am still in shocked seing these numbers...
94% of the Voynich words are connected in a giant graph with Levenshtein values of <=2 (this means 2 character changes, insertion, deletion or substitution). The rest, they are all Hapax legomena and 90% of that rest can be explained dividing the word into smaller words, that are all in the giant graph. This means that 99,4% of the words are connected... stunning -
RE: About the generation of similar words
ReneZ > 4 hours ago
(17-03-2026, 01:37 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is an important fact to take into account: lines were not always written sequentially from top to bottom as any normal text would be. There are many instances of gallows intrusions where the text visibly curves upward to avoid a big gallows glyph on the next line. (This is a big indication of something fishy going on by the way.) So the earlier written words on the same page don't have to be on a line above or to the left on the same line.
This is very important, and I noticed the same back at the time when Gabriel and I did our transliteration activity.
On the other hand, it is not so easy to find many good examples to demonstrate this.
In a few places it is clear that things were not written line by line, but I have not found sufficient convincing evidence that this happened on any significant scale.
Best candidates are the biological and stars sections.
The best evidence for non-linear writing I have seen is in small vertical baseline jumps that appear in the same location on several consecutive lines, but that can also have another explanation.
Again, hard to find examples of it happening on any large scale... -
RE: About the generation of similar words
Jorge_Stolfi > 2 hours ago
(17-03-2026, 01:37 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are many instances of gallows intrusions where the text visibly curves upward to avoid a big gallows glyph on the next line.
I know of one example in the Starred Parags section, which is part of a rather strange mess in the layout. That is followed a few lines later by an abrupt change of handwriting. Apparently in the middle of a word. I fancy that a Scribe was fired for said mess and a new one hired to finish the page.
Since those examples are supposed to be the evidence proving that the Scribing was not "linear", it would be important to list them all in one place.
It may be that the Scribe struggled to understand the Author's handwriting and thus left blanks here and there, to be filled later after consulting the Author.
It may also be that the Scribe wrote a crooked line by accident, and then on the next line he chose to "puff up" some glyphs where he had enough space to do so.
Quote:[René]:The best evidence for non-linear writing I have seen is in small vertical baseline jumps that appear in the same location on several consecutive lines, but that can also have another explanation.
There is also that Herbal page where the Scribe apparently misunderstood a single-column text that was interrupted by the plant as being two columns, and wrote it that way.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: About the generation of similar words
quimqu > 1 hour ago
(Yesterday, 06:02 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Anyway, this question is: given that daiin is the most frequent word in the overall text, is the reason that it appears most because:
- this is just the most frequent word so it appears most frequenty
- this is the word that most frequently results from a small (or zero) change from the recent words.
And then of course the question if or how we can possibly detect this.
Yes, in a strict sense, almost everything could be derived from "daiin" if you allow multiple small steps, because the whole system forms a single connected network. But that is not specific to "daiin". In fact, it is true for any word inside that network. From any node, you can reach any other through chains of small edits.
So the important question is not whether everything can be derived from “daiin”, but whether the system is actually centered around it. And the graph suggests it is not.
"daiin" is not especially central in the network. It does not directly connect to a large portion of the vocabulary (only 5%), and there are other words that are more central in terms of connectivity and average distance.
So while everything can be connected to "daiin", the same is true for any other word. The structure looks more like a dense web than a system expanding from a single root.
This makes it more likely that "daiin" is simply very frequent, rather than the main generative source.
(Yesterday, 06:02 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The background behind my thoughts is related to a question (doubt) I have about the autocopy method.
I’m actually not very convinced by the autocopy idea either.
From what I’m seeing in the CUVA data, almost all the vocabulary (around 94% of tokens) is inside the Levenshtein ≤2 network. That suggests a very dense and coherent system of variation, and not in a form of tree (there is no source, at least easily seen).
To me, that looks less like words being generated locally during writing by copying and slightly modifying the previous one, and more like a system where the word forms already belong to a sort of dictionary, and the writer is selecting from there (codebook?). In other words, it feels more like a predefined generative system than an on-the-fly autocopy process.
Also, the small set of words outside the main network are almost all hapax, and many of them can be explained as combinations of existing tokens from inside the network. That could point to cases where the author is no longer following the usual formation patterns and instead combines known pieces. (Oh, I don't have this word in the dictionary now! Let's join some words and work further)
So my current intuition is that the structure we see is more consistent with a prior generated scheme and controlled variation, rather than simple local copying from one word to the next. -
RE: About the generation of similar words
Torsten > 36 minutes ago
Here is a visualization of the word network that might be useful for the discussion:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Each edge represents an edit distance of 1. To highlight words similar to <daiin>, <ol>, and <chedy> different colors are used. All nodes for a word that contains the glyph <i> are orange. Nodes of a word ending in <d> or <y> are purple. Nodes of words containing <ol>, <or>, <ar>, <al>, or ending with <am> or <os> are green. All other nodes are in blue color. The size of a node is determined by the number of times a token appears in the VMS.
The network graphs for Currier A and B are also available: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
quimqu