Idea to find the word Root, Leaf, Stem, Flower & Seed.

[npcompl33t]

Here is the data from other historical reference works, as you can see root should be fairly obvious to spot when comparing Herbal vs other sections. 


   


the difference is also extreme when looking at books that contain herbal along with other sections


   

[Jorge_Stolfi]

No, that is ultimately what I did. I was hoping that I could identify candidate words in both and perhaps establish some sort of correspondence.

You may find You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. interesting.

All the best, --stolfi

[npcompl33t]

No, that is ultimately what I did. I was hoping that I could identify candidate words in both and perhaps establish some sort of correspondence.

You may find You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. interesting.

All the best, --stolfi

Thanks for sharing. I agree that Herbal A and Herbal B are likely not true different 'languages'. I am attempting to identify some of the specific transformation rules you hypothesize in your post. I have a few possible candidates, but the biggest issue is that enough arbitrary transformations can transform words into those resembling another language, especially with smaller words. 

Therefore before I feel confident in any voynich mappings, I want to show i can detect these types of changes by planting fake transformation rules into real historical texts then testing how successfully i can recover them, but this is still a work-in-progress.

[rkurvink]

I like this idea quite a lot.  

I would expect that on pages full of roots there would be a word or symbol that means root.  In the same way I would expect that text that is coupled with a image of a plant would likely contain a word/symbol that is the name of that plant.  In the Recipe/Pharmaceutical section many plants and roots have unique words/labels next to them.  I have taken these as the title of the plant. I have been going through these to see if the word/symbol placed next to a plant can be found in the text next to matching plants in the botanical section.  Some of Pharmaceutical Plant Image  (PPI)  have no matching botanical plant image (BPI).  Some of the PPI images are near perfect matches with a BPI image.  The majority of the BPI match many of the PPI in some aspect a root structure, leave shape, leaf spacing.  Of the BPI plants I have gone through only a couple labels can be found on the text next to their corresponding PPI.  I am looking for continuity.  Why would you write a book with full page images of plants and apparently corresponding text, to then write a recipe/phamaceutical section that doen't include any of the botanical plants.  But like I wrote some are near perfect matches.  Unfortunately, only a few of the BPI lables appear in the corresponding text to their matching plants.  
I think it would be nice crack in the vale of secrecy if a word/symbol could be paired with a specific plant.  

hope that makes sense.

[DG97EEB]

Silly question.. why have a word for root on a page full of roots?

[Koen G]

Silly question.. why have a word for root on a page full of roots?

Depending on the way it is written, such a page could be full of the word "root". The root of blisterwort is good against sore toes. The root of marsh mallow is good against toothache... Grind up the root of pink nettlebane and mix it with water, apply against melancholia. 

Basically, if the text is instructional at all (which it is in pharmaceutical contexts), I would expect the word "root" to occur a lot when the subject is apparently roots. Could be abbreviated though, maybe even a single glyph.

(I'm not saying this is what we should expect in the VM, just going along with the hypothesis).

[rkurvink]

This root can be identified by the small hairs that grow all over it.  
The end of the root has a reddish tint when it is too young to harvest.  
This root differs from other roots in the way that it connects to the stem.  

These are all statements that would be useful in talking about a variety of roots on the same page.  If the word root is removed none of it makes much since even if the page is full of roots.  But in this case None of the folios in the Voynich display only roots.  This would complicate the message for any of these statements.  Are the leaves, stems, or roots covered with hairs.  The word root is necessary to narrow the scope of the descriptions.  But your point is taken and I agree.  There may not be a word/symbol for root on a page full of roots. 

The ms has a large amount of specific differences among its roots.  It is possible they never use language in the text to talk about the differences but unless it is gibberish, maybe it is, it says something.  Unaware of what they are talking about I have to try to narrow the scope.  They are probably not referring to antlers and hooves.  Hard say though.

For myself I am more interested in finding continuity in the book than identifying the word for root.  If the ms is discussing plants in different sections than I would think there would have to be words in common between those sections, unless it is gibberish.  Ok we all know that it might not say anything at all.  But, if you composed a book with a bunch of full plant images with accompanying text; then wrote another section with various plant parts and items that look like containers there would be words in common.  

Recipes:
which part of the plant to use root, leaf, stem
Grafting:
how to cut the stalk of the two plants to graft them
pharmaceutical:
this part dulls pain, this part is poison



   ...Ok just read DG97EEB, so I just repeated their sentiment...

[ololololo]

I don’t know how this can be done, as there are no guidelines. Maybe I’m missing something, since I haven’t read the thread yet... But I don’t see any clues.

[nablator]

Here is the data from other historical reference works, as you can see root should be fairly obvious to spot when comparing Herbal vs other sections. 

I don't understand. Can you explain what you are counting and how it helps to spot the "root" words?

For example:
Abu Mashar (John translation) 269 (33 hits)

I suppose this is the translation by Johannes Hispalensis (John of Seville) of Flores Albumasaris (Flowers of Abu Ma'shar) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In it you managed to count words radix, radic* and found 269 on 33 pages or something like that?

[npcompl33t]

Here is the data from other historical reference works, as you can see root should be fairly obvious to spot when comparing Herbal vs other sections. 

I don't understand. Can you explain what you are counting and how it helps to spot the "root" words?

For example:
Abu Mashar (John translation) 269 (33 hits)

I suppose this is the translation by Johannes Hispalensis (John of Seville) of Flores Albumasaris (Flowers of Abu Ma'shar) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In it you managed to count words radix, radic* and found 269 on 33 pages or something like that?

The 269 is the normalized occurrences per 1M tokens. In all honestly frequency per 1M tokens is probably excessive for historical manuscripts, but that is a frequently used statistic in NLP. For example, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. page reports the most common English words using the same statistics, under the FrSp column (speech) and FrWr (Writing). You can see 'the' is 39,605. Basically, for every 1 million words, 'the' in English tends to occur about 40k times. The purpose of using this number was you can compare these results, because it is quite extreme. For example, f167, with a value over 6k, would put it in the top 30 general English spoken word list. Although much lower for written words it is still quite high.

You are correct, this analysis used John of Seville’s translation of Abū Maʿshar’s Great Introduction. It found 33 total occurrences. 33 occurrences ÷ 111,325 tokens × 1,000,000 = 296.43.

Here are some examples:

p. 4, line 97
posui in eo radices huius artis
“I placed in it the foundations of this art”—astrological knowledge.

p. 219, line 279
radix cornu illius
“the root/base of its horn”—Taurus, in the third-decan passage.

p. 222, line 379
radix colli Urse Maioris
“the root/base of Ursa Major’s neck.”

p. 223, line 389
arbor magne radicis
“a tree with a large root”—a tree depicted in a decan description.

p. 307, line 1263
in radice nativitatis hominis
“in the radix of a person’s nativity”—the natal configuration.

EDIT: corrected numbers, the Top 30 / 6k was in reference to spoken words not written words.