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Generators and Positional Tendencies

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  • The Voynich Ninja
  • Voynich Research
  • Analysis of the text
  • Generators and Positional Tendencies
• Generators and Positional Tendencies

• Generators and Positional Tendencies

  JoeyB > 3 hours ago

  I'm curious how the generator theories can account for the positional tendencies people here keep finding, and I didn’t want to blow up someone else’s thread about their generator. I'm not arguing against a generator, I just can't picture one rule producing all of them, since they seem to work in different ways.
  
  Starting right at the front of the VMS, the two paragraphs of folio f2r:
  
     
  
  What's been noticed by the pros here:
  
  1. Tavie's vertical impact: a line's opener avoids the glyph directly above it, and it's directional (o→q is common, q→o isn't; o-o is avoided but s-s is fine). You can watch it in the opener column, they keep changing all the way down.
  
  2. Anton's opener order (from "Regaining the lost order"): openers advance through a set sequence, k y d ch o q s sh. Anton reads You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as k-d-q in both paragraphs (which you can see), and says paras tend to open with a gallows. The first paragraph here it runs k→d→q→[c]→o→s→sh.
  
  3. Top row: gallows p/f cluster on the first line of a paragraph (Tavie, Currier, Feaster). Here that's p in ypchol/ypchaiin (line 1) and f in fodan (line 8).
  
  4. Feaster's drift: big picture within a line, sh→ch, qo→o, k→t shift rightward, and word makeup drifts as you go down the paragraph.
  
  5. Line ends: the last word tends to differ from mid words (Currier).
  
  So my question: how does a generator that writes left to right, one line at a time, produce these, especially the vertical one? What ties right drift to opener order to being allergic to verticality… maybe it’s separate habits, coincidence, astral phenomena…
  
  
  
  
  
  // FWIW here is the rabbit hole of other threads I didn’t want to blow up with this question, and sources for positionality such I’ve been sorting through on this. This started with me just privately trying to aggregate rules and tendencies to harmonize over a nice pour of whiskey:
  
  A. Other positional tendencies I left off the image:
  
  benches (ch/sh) are rare as line-openers but spike later: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  first words of lines run longer, second words shorter, Vogt 2012 (plain handwriting effect?): You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  long-range word correlations look like real topic structure, Montemurro & Zanette 2013: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  q-start and m-end lines are anti-correlated (MarcoP and pfeaster in the vertical-impact thread below)
  
  B. Sources for what's on the image:
  
  vertical impact, Tavie: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  opener order, Anton: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  drift, Feaster 2022: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  line as a functional unit, Currier 1976
  
  C. Related threads: 
  
  ch/sh interchangeability You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  copy/mutate ledger You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  hoax/generator debate You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  generators: Timm & Schinner 2019 (self-citation) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  Cardan grille, Rugg 2004 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  ReneZ 2021 write-up You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  Schinner 2007, lots here and the stochastic generator observation You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

• RE: Generators and Positional Tendencies

  oshfdk > 1 hour ago

  I'm not sure I understand the question. It's trivial to adjust a generator to create any positional dependency. As far as I can see, most (all?) generator theories do not really explain anything. I've yet to see a generator theory that would go "so, they implemented this complex system that randomly selects chunks from N lists, because..." Mostly they just attempt to replicate Voynichese using some algorithm. I think I can easily adjust any of the generative algorithms to create a similarity of these positional dependencies, but what for? Some generator theories show that certain features "naturally follow" from certain set of rules, but this again doesn't explain anything, because the set of rules remains absolutely arbitrary and no rationale for its existence is ever provided, at least in most cases. I can't say I have reviewed every generator theory out there. So, I'd say generator theories can trivially incorporate the positional dependencies, but this won't tell us anything new.
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