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[split] What can the structural peculiarities of the VMS tell us about the nature of the underlying text
- [split] What can the structural peculiarities of the VMS tell us about the nature of the underlying text
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RE: [split] What can the structural peculiarities of the VMS tell us about the nature ...
Grove > Yesterday, 03:08 PM
Is there anything more obscure than the VMS? ? -
RE: How should we deal with LLMs on the forum?
Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 07:14 PM
(Yesterday, 12:54 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(06-05-2026, 06:48 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That "code switching by line" is the LAAFU hypothesis.
No, that's not the LAAFU hypothesis. The LAAFU hypothesis is merely that lines are a "functional unit" -- which is to say that each line is composed in such a way that different positions within it display different characteristics, and that these differences can shed light on how the underlying system works and are worth documenting and exploring for that reason.
Sorry, I stand corrected.
However, another way of saying what you wrote above is that the encoding is sensitive to line breaks. Thus the LAAFU hypothesis would allow the encoding to be different for each line, even though it does not imply it.
Quote:What the existence of such patterns might reveal is another question beyond that -- and, indeed, the question of this newly broken-off thread. But the investigation itself should, I believe, be analogous to something like frequency analysis: we first find out what all the patterns are, and then we try to account for them.
That "agnostic" approach is good as a first step. But after observing the existence of anomalies, trying to precisely describe them is likely to be mostly a waste of time. A more effective way to proceed is to formulate hypotheses about their cause and designing the best test for refuting either the hypothesis or the competing ones. That is how one would proceed if Fourier analysis showed an anomalous vibration on an engine.
Quote:1. There's evidence that the text was written to fill available space on the specific pages we have (I agree).
Yes. It seems very unlikely that the Author could have predicted the line breaks (and figure intrusions -- which, IIUC, trigger anomalies similar to those of line breaks). See page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f112v, for example. Clearly the Author -- not just the Scribe -- intended the line breaks to be selected based on the available space.
Quote: 2. Someone would have been crazy to write directly on parchment -- there'd be too much risk of mistakes that would need to be corrected -- so there must have been an earlier draft.
I agree too. But, more than simple "quillos" ("typos, but with a quill"), composing a text usually involves lots of deleting, rewriting, crossing out, changing and transposing words and sentences, etc. So there must have been at least one "draft" version of the VMS prior to the final copy.
And another reason for creating a draft, and recruiting a scribe to put it to vellum, is that not everybody would be able to write small letters in a nice handwriting.
And yet another reason is that writing nice letters by hand is slow and tedious work.
Quote:3. The text we have is so riddled with mistakes that whoever wrote it must not have understood what they were writing -- so this must have been a copyist Scribe separate from the Author.
The presumed spelling errors (like words with anomalous structure) are just one item of evidence for this "Ignorant Scribe" hypothesis. There are also layout mistakes, like that two-column text on f34r.
Also, if one assumes that the Scribe was distinct from the Author, then it is more likely that the Scribe was taught only the graphic alphabet -- not the encoding or language. Not certain, sure; just more likely. Why would the Author bother to teach the encryption method or foreign language to that hypothetical assistant?
Quote:4. That last scenario is incompatible with meaningful line patterning because line breaks originate in the copy and wouldn't have been present in the earlier draft; therefore there must not be any meaningful line patterning, and any line patterning must be superficial and ultimately insignificant.
Yes.
Said another way, the LAAFU hypothesis, together with the assumption that line breaks are determined by line length, implies that (1) the "functional" aspect of line beaks is a matter of encoding, not a matter of contents (like verses of poetry, items of a catalog, etc); and (2) whoever put pen to vellum knew the encoding, and applied it on the fly, after choosing the line breaks.
I find that scenario very unlikely, given the other considerations above.
Quote:5. If we can show through simulations that some rule-based protocol for introducing line breaks into any text could ever produce statistical anomalies of any kind at the starts and ends of lines, then we can conclude that this is the correct explanation for any and all such anomalies in the VMS, without needing to account for specific positional differences any more concretely.
That is much stronger than what I meant.
Rather: since even the trivial line-breaking algorithm has been shown to create statistical anomalies around the line breaks, the mere existence of such anomalies does not prove the LAAFU hypothesis. There is still the alternative hypothesis that all the anomalies are consequences of the Scribe's line-breaking "algorithm", which is almost certainly more sophisticated than the trivial one.
Therefore, evidence for LAAFU would have to be anomalies that cannot be explained as side effects of any plausible line-breaking algorithm.
Conversely, if a simulation of some plausible line-breaking algorithm were to generate anomalies like those seen in the VMS, the LAAFU hypothesis could be ignored as unnecessary.
Quote:A more rigorous exercise in support of the line-break hypothesis might involve taking some actual section of the VMS and presenting for it (1) a hypothetical, statistically flat "author's draft" version of the text without line breaks, or with different line breaks; and (2) a simple set of rules for converting that text into a "scribe's copy" that displays line-based patterns identical to (or very close to) the ones we actually see.
(Yesterday, 01:11 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And then a follow-up experiment: take the inferred "author's draft" and run it through the same set of copying / line-break rules, but now with the length available for each line increased to something like 1.3 times its current capacity. The line breaks will now mostly fall in different places. Does the "copied" result still display the same line-positional patterns as before?
Yes. The flat version (1) could be obtained by taking each parag, discarding the head line, undoing the abbreviation of iin to m (and/or any other guessed abbreviation), and joining the lines into a single token stream. That token stream would then be fed to the assumed line-breaking algorithm with various page widths.
@quimqu and myself have been doing such experiments in some thread out there. We observed that the line-breaking algorithm does generate anomalies at the new breaks. But, as of the last posts, we still had not managed to erase the anomalies of the old breaks. Clearly there is more going on than just iin -> m.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: [split] What can the structural peculiarities of the VMS tell us about the nature ...
tavie > Today, 12:44 AM
Agree with Patrick. When people refer to 'LAAFU', they are not necessarily claiming the code switches from line to line. I don't know anyone who believes that, and I don't recognize the types of LAAFU set out You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. LAAFU was a phrase used by Currier, and we can't be sure exactly what he meant by it. Certainly, a possible inference is that the system varies line by line. But that jars with the consistency of word types elsewhere in the line.
Several people on here simply use the phrase to mean that Voynichese is not flat, and that something unusual is going on at the line level that needs to be investigated. Emma May Smith You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
On the "line break algorithm", if the scribe did regularly break the line rather than find a way to squeeze in a longer word (which has not been proved and should be carefully considered how it interacts with claims of abbreviation at line end as well), we still need to explain
- why line start word types often do not resemble the word types that the scribe failed to squeeze in (i.e. ones underperforming at Line End)
- why several line start word types are rarely seen in the middle of the row (we can see why they won't be at Line End but why not elsewhere?)
- why daiin is more common at Line End and chol is not in Herbal A despite both being similar size (and indeed why initial d word types are more common the closer you get to Line End)
- why the line start word appears to be impacted in many cases by the word above it
There's still likely some medium and high hanging fruit up in the tree for us to pick that might shed further light on these "somethings", and that's not a waste of time.
As a final note for any newcomers, we have accumulated a few LAAFU threads now which are worth reading:
- why line start word types often do not resemble the word types that the scribe failed to squeeze in (i.e. ones underperforming at Line End)
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RE: [split] What can the structural peculiarities of the VMS tell us about the nature ...
MarcoP > 4 hours ago
(Today, 12:44 AM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.2. why several line start word types are rarely seen in the middle of the row (we can see why they won't be at Line End but why not elsewhere?)
In particular, it's interesting that line-start words contain bigrams (like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) that are quite rare elsewhere.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was that "there could be a process which adds [y, d] to words beginning [ch, sh] when they are in a linestart position".
It's unclear that Voynichese is a cipher, so we don't know if there is an underlying text. Personally, I doubt that properties like this could derive from the hypothetical underlying text.