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[Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
- [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
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RE: [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
Grove > 11-07-2026, 01:04 PM
(10-07-2026, 05:41 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The quiremarks were added when the manuscript was bound, which we are suggesting took place a bit later in the manuscript's history. As for Quire 9, I think it's likely that the quiremarks were written when whoever bound it was getting the quires organized, but for reasons unknown it was sewn in through a different fold. As Wladimir has shown, the holes that correspond with the correct valley-fold for quire 9 were never actually stitched.
I’m still a little confused how the gathering mark ended up in the wrong place if the book was already bound without being rebounded from a previously correct alignment. The person adding the marks would surely have known he was marking on a recto instead of the expected verso.
I also know this is a very minor point to focus on from your paper. -
RE: [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
LisaFaginDavis > 11-07-2026, 01:36 PM
That's not really an important part of this particular work, but I have written an entire chapter in our forthcoming book that treats the question of the material history of the manuscript. Here's the sequence I propose:
In order to prepare the nested bifoliate quires for binding, the numbers would have been added to the last verso of each quire, so that the binder would know what to do. For Quire 9, I suspect that whomever did the nesting and preparation wrote the number in the correct place and binder sewed the wrong valley-fold (or they changed their mind and sewed through that fold intentionally).
We should be grateful to the mysterious mis-binder, since if the manuscript hadn't been protected by being sewn together and attached to wooden boards, it would almost certainly not have survived.
Regarding the covers: there is a difference between the sewing, which is original (except for the later repairs, which don't impact the sequence of bifolia), and the boards to which the quires are attached via the perpendicular cords at the spine. The wooden boards were replaced by the Jesuits with the current limp vellum in the nineteenth century without conducting a new quire-sewing campaign.
A lecture I gave on this topic at the University of Toronto last year is online here:
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Some of the conclusions in the Singulion article differ from what I present about the data analytics in that lecture, because the work was ongoing. The Digital Medievalist article represents the latest work. -
RE: [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
Jorge_Stolfi > 11-07-2026, 04:41 PM
(11-07-2026, 12:23 PM)Juan_Sali Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In my opinion the experiment had very low chances of getting any positive result.There is an implicit condition in the experiment: words in Vochinese are words of an unkown natural language.
Not really. It is enough that the mapping from plaintext to Voynichese maps each word type to the the same word type or word types, in a sufficiently large fraction of the cases. Like, for example, 70% of the daiin come from the plaintext word "herb", 70% of the Chedy come from "serpent", etc. That would be enough to make two pages with the same topic have a higher-than-expected number of shared words.
But there is another problem with the idea of using word usage similarity to order the pages. It may work for the Bio section, where a topic like "digestive system" may span several pages. It is not expected to work on Herbal and Recipes, because each paragraph is likely to be an independent text, and we do not expect parags in adjacent pages to use more common words than parags in two distant pages.
Thus, if one orders the pages by that criterion, one would get a seemingly continuous sequence, where word usage changes gradually along the sequence and is increasingly different as the pages gert further apart. However, that gradient would be spurious, created by the ordering process itself.
As an analogy, suppose that one orders the books on a bookshelf by size. The result will be a nice smooth gradient of sizes. But of course that does not mean anything: we cannot infer that the books were printed in that order...
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
LisaFaginDavis > 11-07-2026, 10:59 PM
That's exactly right. That's why we didn't propose a reordering of the herbal section or anything other than quires 13 and 20, for which the results were very clear! I'll also add that at the end of the article we state quite explicitly that we cannot know if our re-ordering is correct until and unless we can read the thing. -
RE: [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
asteckley > 12-07-2026, 12:33 AM
Lisa and Colin, as I’ve expressed to you before, I think this is really great work, both technically and substantively!
There is one aspect that I’m wondering how you explain—although it does not really detract from the plausibility of the rest of your hypothesized explanation of the book’s original collation.
When we look at the separate sheets unbound from the codex—most of which are single bifolios, although some are larger foldouts, such as trifolios and even seven-panel foldouts—it makes sense that they may have been composed independently of their eventual ordering within the bound sequence.
A good example is the recto and verso sides of the single vellum sheet that forms Quire 9. We can perceive visual similarities among all the panels on a given side, in contrast with those on the opposite side. That grouping of similar diagrams is broken up in the page sequence of the bound version—and I know there are even better examples than this.
Recto
Verso
But if the full sheets were created with the intention of standing alone, how do we explain Quire 14—folios 85 and 86—which consists of the large six-panel sheet? The reverse side of the sheet, opposite the large rosette drawing, contains individual page panels, some of which consist entirely of Voynichese script.
It seems to have been created with the intention of being bound, given that some of the text panels contain script in opposing orientations—that is, upside down relative to one another.
Regards,
Andrew -
RE: [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
LisaFaginDavis > 12-07-2026, 01:06 AM
It was certainly made with the intention of being folded, but whether that intent was for sewing or not, we can't say. -
RE: [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
asteckley > 12-07-2026, 06:18 AM
(12-07-2026, 01:06 AM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It was certainly made with the intention of being folded, but whether that intent was for sewing or not, we can't say.
It seems an unnatural way to use a large square sheet. Drawing the large rosette diagram on one side is understandable, even as it appears to have been done without regard to the three folds that were later made in the sheet.
But after turning the sheet over, the decision to divide the other side into six separate panels of content with different orientations seems strange, even if the plan was simply to fold it up. Treating the sheet as six panels is consistent with the typical page size, so that part is not surprising. What is puzzling is the choice of multiple directions: three are upright, while the entire sheet must be rotated 180 degrees to read the other three.
This suggests that the maker had something more in mind than simply folding it down to size. And if the purpose was not the elaborate foldout design in which it was eventually bound, then what was it?
Perhaps it was just intended as a little standalone-pamphlet with just six pages, but with a drawing that you can only view after completely unfolding it to become a full size sheet. Possible, but it seems an odd scenario that stretches the imagination.
Recto & Verso:
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RE: [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
dashstofsk > 12-07-2026, 07:05 PM
Evidence for singulions? Only if you are of the opinion that the text is meaningful.
But if you are an artificial construction / meaningless text / hoax hypothesist then there is a simple explanation for the high confoliate and conjoint scores. The author wrote the pages sheet-by-sheet. First both halves of a side then the other. As it was all meaningless he need not have done it any other way. When finally he felt he had enough, he stacked them in any order, any orientation. Moreover, at each sitting the writer approached the task with a fresh mindset. The style of the writing that day depended on his temperament and inclination that day. Knowing that no-one would ever understand the text he could change or adapt or apply some variation as he wished. Was under no obligation to make the text consistent or to follow any particular standard. If it so happened that the writer could only do at most two or three pages each day then it would follow that confoliate and conjoint pages would likely be similar in style and content.
It is so simple. Confoliate and conjoint correlation compliments this scenario nicely and the conclusion of this investigation should not surprise any hoax hypothesist. -
RE: [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
Jorge_Stolfi > 13-07-2026, 08:10 AM
(12-07-2026, 07:05 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is so simple. Confoliate and conjoint correlation compliments this scenario nicely and the conclusion of this investigation should not surprise any hoax hypothesist.
But the problem for the hoaxists is the opposite: that the language (by all metrics) is in fact remarkably constant throughout the book. (Except for the abrupt A/B switch, that looks more like a change of spelling or encrypting than a change of language.) The variations from page to page are dwarfed by the similarities.
To explain this consistency, hoaxists must postulate that (1) the Author wanted to make the text look like natural language, even though its most obvious features were quite unlike those of any language known in Europe; (2) He had enough grasp of linguistics to know what that goal meant, and (3) he devised some complicated gibberish generation method that would do that, and used it consistently, though the whole book.
To me, that does not sound much more likely than the Secret Convent of the Lesbian Daughters or the Templars...
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis
Juan_Sali > 13-07-2026, 11:34 AM
(11-07-2026, 04:41 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
But it it not the case, under a cipher hypothesis the fragmentation of natural words can be made in different ways,Quote:In my opinion the experiment had very low chances of getting any positive result.There is an implicit condition in the experiment: words in Vochinese are words of an unkown natural language.
Not really. It is enough that the mapping from plaintext to Voynichese maps each word type to the the same word type or word types, in a sufficiently large fraction of the cases. Like, for example, 70% of the daiin come from the plaintext word "herb", 70% of the Chedy come from "serpent", etc. That would be enough to make two pages with the same topic have a higher-than-expected number of shared words.
herb as h erb, he rb, her b ...
Some fragments can be common to several natural words.
Also there will be more than 1 way to express every fragment.
All together will hide any pattern of common shared natural words of a same topic.