Anyone who proposes that Voynichese works in a ‘flat’ (i.e. straightforward) way has a number of extremely basic problems to overcome.
For a start, there are the Voynichese’s ‘LAAFU’ (Emma May Smith’s acronym for Captain Prescott Currier’s phrase “Line As A Functional Unit”, though she now prefers to talk about “line patterns”) behaviours to account for. These relate to the curious ways that letters / words work both at the start of lines and at the end of lines, many of which are discussed by Emma May Smith here:
- Line-first words have a quite different first-letter distribution from the main body of words’ first-letter distribution
- Line-first words are slightly longer than expected
- Line-second words are slightly shorter than expected
- Line-final words frequently end in EVA ‘m’ / ‘am’
At the same time, there are also some odd PAAFU (“Paragraph As A Functional Unit”) behaviours to consider. The most famous of these is the way that the first letter of a paragraph (and even more so of the first paragraph on a page) has a significantly different distribution from elsewhere, one that strongly favours gallows characters (and in particular the single leg gallows EVA ‘p’).
But the other major PAAFU behaviour is that single leg gallows glyphs appear predominantly on the first line of paragraphs, and only rarely elsewhere (these are known as Tiltman lines, after my hero John Tiltman). You can see this throughout the Voynich Manuscript, right from Herbal A page f3r…
…to the Herbal B page f43r (which has an extra single leg gallows, but the remaining ones all sit on the first line of their respective paragraphs)…
…to the Q13 Balneo page f76v (where there are two extra single leg gallows, sure, but the rest of the page slavishly follows the pattern)…
So, even though the internal structure of Voynichese words changes significantly across the different sections (and that’s a separate topic entirely), this single-leg-gallows-mainly-on-top-lines-of-paragraphs Tiltman behaviour seems to remain essentially constant throughout them all.
This is an issue that has been floating round for decades, and I would be surprising if it had originated even from John Tiltman. More recently, Rene Zandbergen discussed it on voynich.ninja back in 2017, pointing out that this behaviour appeared – in his view – to be inconsistent with any model for Voynichese that was inherently uniform (which I call ‘flat’ here), whether linguistic, cryptographic or whatever.
So, the challenge to anyone trying to come up with some kind of theory for the Voynichese text is simply to explain why this unexpected behaviour is the way it is. What kind of mechanism could be behind it?
Q20 Paragraph-Initial Glyphs
For the rest of this post, I’m going to restrict my discussion to the twenty-three Voynich Q20 (‘Quire 20’) pages, simply because their lack of drawings make them particularly easy to work with.
The first thing to point out is that we have two single leg gallow behaviours (very frequent at paragraph starts, and very frequent on the top line of paragraphs) which overlap somewhat.
For example, f103r (the first bound page of Q20), has 19 starred paragraphs, of which 9 begin with the single leg gallow EVA ‘p’ (i.e. 47.3%). And if you count all the paragraph-initial p’s and f’s in Q20, you get:
| Page | p | f | paras |
| f103r | 9 | 0 | 18 |
| f103v | 7 | 0 | 14 |
| f104r | 5 | 0 | 13 |
| f104v | 7 | 0 | 13 |
| f105r | 7 | 0 | 10 |
| f105v | 7 | 0 | 10 |
| f106r | 11 | 0 | 15 |
| f106v | 6 | 1 | 15 |
| f107r | 9 | 1 | 15 |
| f107v | 10 | 0 | 15 |
| f108r | 6 | 2 | 16 |
| f108v | 7 | 0 | 8 |
| f111r | 4 | 0 | 6 |
| f111v | 7 | 0 | 8 |
| f112r | 8 | 1 | 12 |
| f112v | 8 | 0 | 13 |
| f113r | 7 | 3 | 17 |
| f113v | 10 | 4 | 15 |
| f114r | 5 | 2 | 13 |
| f114v | 5 | 0 | 12 |
| f115r | 4 | 2 | 13 |
| f115v | 6 | 0 | 13 |
| f116r | 6 | 0 | 8 |
| Total | 161 | 16 | 292 |
The values for Q20 as a whole are remarkably consistent: there is a 161/292 = 55.14% chance that a paragraph starts with EVA p, and 16/292 = 5.48% chance that a paragraph starts with EVA f.
Given that ‘p’ makes up 1.03% of the glyphs in Q20 (‘f’ makes up 0.19%), ‘p’ is ~55x more likely to appear as the first glyph of a Q20 paragraph than it is to appear in any other glyph position: even ‘f’ is 28x more likely to appear paragraph-initial than elsewhere. That’s striking, and not at all flat.
Q20 Tiltman Lines
Q20 contains about 10700 words across about 1100 lines (I don’t have the exact figures to hand): 643 of these contain a single leg gallow, i.e. the raw chance any given Q20 word contains a single leg gallow = 643/10700 = 6%.
But whatever the explanation for p being so strongly biased to this paragraph-initial position, I think we should try to separate the single-leg-paragraph-initial behaviour from the single-leg-top-line (Tiltman) behaviour.
So if we remove the 292 paragraph-initial words, the raw chance that any non-paragraph-initial Q20 word contains a single leg gallow goes down to (643-292)/(10700-292) = 3.3%, which is our baseline figure here.
But what of top-line-but-not-initial Q20 words? Given that Q20 has 292 paragraphs, each with a first line containing (say) ten words, and we are removing the first word, we have 292 x ~9 = ~2628 top-line words of interest. Of these (by my counting), 353 contain a ‘p’, and 80 contain an ‘f’. Hence the probability that any given Q20 paragraph-top-line-but-not-initial word contains a single leg gallows is 433/2628 = 16.5%.
Similarly, the probability that any given non-top-line Q20 word contains a single leg gallows is roughly (643-177-433)/(10700-292*10) = 0.4%. So if we discount all the paragraph-initial words, words containing single leg gallows are about 16.5%/0.4% = ~41x more likely to appear on the top lines of paragraphs than on the other lines.
Q20 Neal Keys
One of the interesting things that has been noted about these single leg gallows on the top line of paragraphs is that they seem to often appear in adjacent words. This is something that Voynich researcher Philip Neal first mentioned in a Voynich pub meet a fair few years ago that he had noticed: at the time, I christened them Neal keys.
But even though this is a visually striking thing, is it statistically significant, particularly if we remove all the paragraph-initial single leg gallows first?
For non-paragraph-initial-top-line words, the raw (expected) probability that a pair of adjacent words both contain a single leg gallows would seem to be 16.5% x 16.5% = 2.7%.
My counts for the actual number of pairs of adjacent non-paragraph-initial-top-line Q20 words both containing single leg gallows (i.e. ignoring all paragraph-initial words) were 5/5/6/1/8/12/7/6/7/4/5/0/8/6/3/5/9/4/12/5/1/5/2 = 126 instances out of (353 + 80) = 433.
So, of the 292 x (9-1) = ~2336 potential adjacent pairs (discounting the end word of each top line), 126 instances points to a chance of 126/2336 = 5.4%.
So my conclusion from this is therefore that the phenomenon of Neal keys (pairs of words containing single leg gallows on the top line of paragraphs) is, while visually striking, only 2x the expected value.
To be clear, the phenomenon is definitely there, but the main factor driving it appears to be the very strong tendency for single leg gallows to appear on the top line of paragraphs, rather than the adjacency pairing per se.
Verification
I’ve done a lot of this manually, because I didn’t have sufficient automated tools to hand. So can one or more other Voynich researchers please verify these figures?
- I used the Takahashi EVA transcription
- I counted ch / sh / ckh / cfh / cph / cth as individual glyphs
- I didn’t count space characters in the percentages
Nick, did you do the same analysis for ancient texts, like Dioscorides, for example, to see if there are words that only meet at the beginning of a paragraph?
Ruby: I’m talking about a specific letter (or glyph) that appears predominantly at the start of paragraphs, even though the rest of the paragraph-initial word following that letter varies tremendously. The problem is that straightforward (‘flat’) texts simply don’t work like that, which is why Rene Zandbergen puts this behaviour forward as something that makes any flat reading of the text simply impossible.
The point is simply that if you say that EVA ‘p’ gets transformed to a specific letter in your proposed plaintext, then you end up with text where that letter only appears in the top line of paragraphs. And what kind of a strange plaintext would that be?
No doubt about it John Tiltman legacy is much to admire, making him every serious crypto’s undoubted super hero, a man who went to great lengths to downplay his enormous natural talents, giving credit for his many manual break-ins, whether they be Russian, German or Japanese, to others like Turing or some not so talented contributing team members. I have particular regard for ‘the Brig’ in that he didn’t see any need for fancy letters after his name, apart those applied to his cherished Military Cross award earned in the mud & blood of France before being carried off the field of conflict more dead than alive.
From my limited understanding of his Voynich intervention in 1951 at behest of Bill Friedman, up until he delivered a short paper in ’68 under full cover of US secrecy provisions?, Tiltman seemed of the opinion that VM was either a failed attempt at a substitution cipher or, an artificial language suggested by Friedman about which he wasn’t himself overly enthused. It seems that after BF’s passing and with Mary D’Impisario taking more of an interest, ‘the Brig’ more or less gave it up as being either an crackable lost cause or else a hoax, according to some. NB: In re Nick’s ‘Tiltman Line’ theory, I note ‘the Brig’ was no fan of mathematically based chances of probability, if relevant to one or two post gallows glyphs may be splitting hairs!
That glyph can be mapped onto the rosette page, like all the other characters. Its position is at the top right – it comes up through the middle of the diagram, hangs right, loops and crosses back over itself showing us its position. The top right is the Logos, or Word of the hermetical worldview. Its centre is a spiral of words. The Word called all things into existence (and if you tap into your divine nature – hey you can too – the premise of medieval magic anyway, and the reason all those star daimones have names – so you can call on them).
I strongly suspect those aren’t recipes, they are incantations, vis a vis Picatrix.
I am unsure, Nick, why nobody seems to look at any of this, or at least I can’t find them. I did my minor in Anth and one way into understanding artifacts of a culture is to view them through its worldview. And we have it – the author/s gave it to us in the rosette page. It’s the hermetical genesis strongly influenced by Judaism I suspect, as well as route of the soul and body (opposite paths) to rebirth through gaining wisdom. I am writing a formal paper that covers almost every detail of the rosette page through this lense, and connects it to the other imagery throughout. I hadn’t planned on looking at the text, but the author even stuck the rosette outline in the middle of the alphabet page to tell us how to read it. And once you place the alphabet characters in their proper places on the diagram, the ciphers start to come into focus. Yes, there are more than one, but because I can derive meaning from the standalone symbols, and know their context, I’m gleaning a good sense of how the text works.
Mary D’Imperio had everything she needed except a good copy of the ms, especially the rosettes page.
Nick, each first line of a paragraph could contain one or more names of people, stars, plants, animals, towns, foreign words,… etc. that require special spelling, representation, adornment,…. like our italics, capitals, notes, sequence numbers, foreign alpabetical characters,…. while in the remainder of that paragraph these terms are explained or treated.
Ger Hungerink: in the post, I quite deliberately didn’t go on to speculate as to the origin of these features, because my belief now is that speculation is only worthwhile once you have really locked down what few related facts there are to be known (and this is hardly ever the case for the Voynich Manuscript, sadly).
But, as you point out, one possible explanation (if not quite a theory) for the single leg gallows is indeed that they represent some kind of textual ‘escape’ character, like ‘bold’, ‘italic’, or ‘rubric’ (which I have suggested in the past).
There is a key to cipher the Voynich manuscript.
The key to the cipher manuscript placed in the manuscript. It is placed throughout the text. Part of the key hints is placed on the sheet 14. With her help was able to translate a few dozen words that are completely relevant to the theme sections.
The Voynich manuscript is not written with letters. It is written in signs. Characters replace the letters of the alphabet one of the ancient language. Moreover, in the text there are 2 levels of encryption. I figured out the key by which the first section could read the following words: hemp, wearing hemp; food, food (sheet 20 at the numbering on the Internet); to clean (gut), knowledge, perhaps the desire, to drink, sweet beverage (nectar), maturation (maturity), to consider, to believe (sheet 107); to drink; six; flourishing; increasing; intense; peas; sweet drink, nectar, etc. Is just the short words, 2-3 sign. To translate words with more than 2-3 characters requires knowledge of this ancient language. The fact that some symbols represent two letters. In the end, the word consisting of three characters can fit up to six letters. Three letters are superfluous. In the end, you need six characters to define the semantic word of three letters. Of course, without knowledge of this language make it very difficult even with a We can say that the Voynich manuscript is an encyclopedia of knowledge that humanity needs today. I managed to partially solve the mystery of mount Kailas ( for example, its height is 6825 meters). The manuscript indicates the place where the Grail Is hidden, as well as the Font and Cradle of Jesus.
I am ready to share information.
With respect, Nikolai.
Nick, I just meant to say that if these p/f words are labels of some sort that require special spelling and these labels are then explained in the remainder of the paragraph, that would explain them appearing only at the top or first lines. That would make Voynichese and its p/f behavior no more mysterious than text in any language that would be dictionary like. After all, the (isolated) labels in the VM are differently from the general text as well. As are Chinese words with all their c’s, q’s and x’s cited in Dutch.
Ger Hungerink: that’s a pretty good example of how quickly a theory about the p/f letters can spiral out of control, requiring the rest of the text to willingly adapt to accommodate its specific foibles. Which is why I don’t like speculation any more. 🙂
Nick, I am not speculating, I am explaining that the behavior of p/f in the VM is not nescesarily as unusual as you speculate it to be 🙂 So unusual that you gave it a name. I merely explain that “all” languages can show that e.g. in dictionaries or encyclopedia’s. Before Dutch got influenced heavily by Latin and French it used only 22 letters. Had they developed a script of their own they would have needed extra characters for q, x, y and c (except in “ch”) for foreign words. Suppose they had chosen gallows for these four letters and a “Dutch” book explaining latin/french named plants, stars, gods, geography, medicins, myths… would almost look like the VM 🙂
Nikolai, well done!
Now I am very curious where the Grail Is hidden, as well as the Font and Cradle of Jesus. But of course you are not going to tell us. You are going to unearth them to take the honor for yourself. And of course you are not going to tell anyone when you got them, afraid as you might be of criminals going after you. If they are not already to get the information out of you…
Ger Hungerink: if you were to construct an explanation for Voynichese purely around the single leg gallows behaviour, that is indeed one of the possible ways it could end up. And I would agree that it is a rational explanation, albeit one with some rather awkward implications.
Something like a positional marker is not very likely, because single-leg gallows do occur in single-vord labels, although not very frequently: if I’m not mistaken, much less frequently than double-legged ones.
So probably some notion-marker. My favourite idea is that a prefix like “o” or “y” before a gallow serves like an operator over a noun. However, the baseline jump between the prefix and the gallow which is often exhibited in the text does not support this idea very well.
But then there is the gallows coverage, which is totally unexplored statistically. Some stats on that could bring light on the problem. I can’t imagine why you would need loop coverage over adjacent glyphs if a gallow is simply a notion marker.
As a side note, it makes sense to consider filtering out benched gallows from this consideration, since they well could be – with certain indications to that manifested by double-legged benched gallows – separate characters in their own right.
Anton: I think you’re right, I should have done my testing with benched gallows much more in mind than I did, to try to bring out the practical differences between benched and unbenched gallows. I’ll try to do that next.
But the actual thing I’m trying to do
here is to work out if we can talk meaningfully about Voynichese without first having to impose a theory.
I don’t think so, because exploration goes from assumption (“theory”) to verification, and zero assumption simply has too much avenues to go, you need to choose one of them from the onset.
For example, the “Tiltman line” pathway is an assumption in itself – it assumes that a line is a line. However, with many indications of multipass in the VMS text, it’s far from self-evident that a line of Voynichese maps 1:1 to a line of source plain text. Imagine a multi-column structure, and the Tiltman line disappears.
Anton: I’m trying to wind back the theory slider as far as I can manage. There will always be theories so perverse or so nihilistic that they undermine the very notion or validity of statistics, but… that’s not my interest.
Could this single leg gallow just be an additive ? One of many.
Ger Hungerink, You are right, I can only provide this information to the relevant state or religious structure. It is impossible to get hold of these artifacts unnoticed. There are a lot of people in this place during the day, but at night it is closed.
xplor: Voynichese has such a small main alphabet that relegating any of the letters to an additive role may mean you run out of them very quickly. 🙂
The bad thing is that any strict “rule” still evades us. For example, it is not that there is a single-leg gallow in each 1st line of each paragraph.
In fact, not only 1st lines or paragraphs, but entire folios without a single single-leg gallow do exist. f56v, for example.
Anton: absolutely, yes. But to start to break Voynichese, we will need to find any rule, however small, however incidental, however curious. And I guess my point is that we shouldn’t need to agree on a hugely restrictive theory underlying everything to collect data to search for that first rule.
For example, if there is any kind of rationality to Voynichese, there will be a numbering system in there, though perhaps not in the places people expect it. And any kind of regularity might help break the numbering system.
Nick, if I understood your answer correctly, there is no analysis of ancient texts for the distribution of words or letters?
Ruby: because there is no reason to suspect that any texts – ancient or modern – would exhibit such a strange behaviour, there has been no reason to go looking for it in them.
Language is inherently flat – and Voynichese is not. Therein lies the mystery.
Nick, I still don’t get what you mean by “flat”. Would you consider my regular language examples, like dictionaries, encyclopedia or for that matter books that explain foreign named plants, medicins, stars, etc. “flat”? I don’t see your “mysterie”, not when there is a common sense explanation available even if you call that “speculation”. I see it as counter examples.
Ger Hungerink: if you can show me how the Voynich Herbal A bifolios fit together so that all the pages beginning with EVA p sit consecutively (you know, in the way that dictionaries and encyclopaedias do), then I can start to take your suggestion a bit more seriously.
Nick, my question was, would you call encyclopedias, dictionaries, or any text explaining foreign terms using letters rare in the actual language, and which are cited in the first line and then explained in the paragraph “flat”?
Would a reference book that uses a certain symbol or rare letter acting as a “paragraph” symbol from time to time at the start of a page or paragraph still be “flat”?
I am not saying the VM actually is a dictionary, I am saying it might have some of its properties and maybe interspersed with “normal” Voynichean. I am saying this might explain the p/f behavior in a simple way, without resorting to qualifications like “mysterious” and “unknown to any language”.
Calculating frequencies without looking at what they might stand for only leads to numbers, not to possible explanations.
Ger Hungerink: you’re making a back to front argument here. In fact, calculating frequencies (if you’re suitably careful about it) without looking at what they might stand for leads to knowledge, which in turn helps eliminate impossible explanations.
Nick, so what about reference books, recipe books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, herbals, diaries, etc. where the first or top lines contain foreign words or terms and possibly special symbols for date, weight, volume, location, time, reference, size, etc. more than in the explanatory text. Are they “flat”? Even if some lemmas are long, or if the text is “regular “from time to time. Is the VM unique in its p/f behavior while it could well be explained that way?
Knowing the exact frequencies/chances for “red” or “number 26” in a casino is useless unless you know what they stand for. It is obvious without counting that red has a higher frequency. Only when you want to make money and know what they stand for they make sense. If you want to win on your bet, bet “red”. If you target a million: keep betting all you have on “26”.
Ger Hungerink: it is not enough to argue from an imagined or predicted possibility, that’s a weak starting point.
I tried to make it clear in the post that the p/f paragraph-initial and paragraph-top-line behaviours are present in every section containing paragraphs, so it’s a universal property of Voynichese. And yet they’re not rigidly consistent!
So it’s a much deeper mystery than can be explained away by a single throwaway suggestion.
Again you did not answer my “flat” question.
You must be a politician 🙂
You reason as if you know what is written in the text that makes the p/f behavior exclusive to only Voynichian, even claiming a deep mystery. Lemmas in an English dictionary all have the same peculiar structure for the first line, different from the following explanation. Would that make it a universal property of English? Again this is an example(!) – I am not saying the VM is a dictionary.
For the time being it is only you that is doing the “throwaway…”.
Ger Hungerink: …but you keep on pretending that the Voynichese p/f behaviour is as universal or as regular as in a dictionary or encyclopaedia, when it simply isn’t.
Why not point me at some of the late medieval encyclopaedias and dictionaries you’re basing your argument on? I’ll give you a starting point: why not look at Giovanni Fontana’s 1454 encyclopaedia? His “Liber de omnibus rebus naturalibus quae continentur in mundo, videlicet coelestibus et terrestribus nec non mathematicis et de angelis motoribus quae coelorum” was republished in Venice in 1544 by Pompilio Azali.
Nick,
You know I rarely utter on the subject of Voynichese, and I’m withholding judgement until I see a full effort by the Turkish chaps issued in print. If – and it’s a big if – their translation meets with approval, I think we’ll find that what they describe as ‘old Turkish’ is simply an old Turkic language.
However, apart from that I’ve found the most impressive comment to be that by Julian Bunn, who concluded that the written part of this text isn’t a language at all, in the sense of a grammatical ‘plain text’ converted into some form of cipher as so many have started by presuming it would be.
About those forms you call ‘single leg gallows’ (though the term ‘gallows’ is anachronistic, let it stand)… I think their purpose is to direct, or instruct the reader about some aspect of what follows,
Simply as example prompted by the ornamental/instructional use of furling banners in works of the 12th-14thC, within as well as without Europe, you find their style informs the reader that the town under that banner is a small place, a larger town, or a walled town with citadel. That’s the sort of thing, in the most general way, that I mean by ‘instruction’ or ‘direction’ for the reader.
Cheers.
Diane: as I’m sure you already know, my assessment of the Old Turkish Voynich theory lies on the ascending probability line just to the left of fake moon landings. But I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, though I’d wish they had started with something simple like, for example, the single leg gallows characters. 😉
I quite like your suggestion that a pair of single leg gallows acts like a banner or flag. It’s essentially what Philip Neal was saying, in that he wondered what was being highlighted between the two single leg gallows. But sadly this doesn’t yet unravel much of the mystery, so we must carry onwards. :-/
Nick – thank you. Nothing could better make my day than having Neal as citable precedent.
On second thoughts, though, I’m not sure I deserve the comparison, because I was thinking very literally and of particular banners seen on a map of the holy land’s coast. So not really a linguistic insight, so much as a period note.
Nick – a question.
Can you recall anyone’s having undertaken a linguistic analytical study of just the ‘Neal key’ headers?
I ask because, thinking again of Julian’s conclusion, it occurs to me that just as + can change significance (addition sign; sign of blessing; form of the letter ‘t’), just so these ‘single leg’ forms may have different significance depending on whether they are from the headers or ordinary text. If such were so, then the more likely to be meant to convey sound would be the headers, I should think.
I don’t agree with you (yet?) about the ‘Turkic’ possibility. The oddities of the binding – specifically the stitch supports – when considered together with other aspects of manufacture and the information embodied in the iconography (I refer here to the research and conclusions of my research between 2008-2016), all make the.. or rather a .. Turkic language quite feasible if the text is, indeed, of such a kind.
I rather think, though, that in their nationalistic enthusiasm, the Canadians have assumed all forms of Turkic language, both known and only known about, are direct antecedents of modern Turkish. Not being a linguist, especially not in ancient and medieval Turkic languages and dialects, I’ll wait on the judgement of those specialists.
Diane: as far as the single leg gallows go, the point of my post was to highlight that I think researchers have omitted to do what would seem to me basic research into cataloguing and understanding the statistics of their usage, and my post offered merely a starting point on that journey. I have several more posts planned on the subject (though I’m sure it may seem unbelievably arcane to some), and hope that by the end I will be able to start peering through the murk to the kind of thing you discuss. :-/
I’m afraid, Ger, that I am fully with Nick on this topic. While one could ‘imagine’ that there could be some pointers on first lines, this is not something that really happens in contemporary texts. And even if it did, this would rather make the ‘p’ and ‘f’ characters something else than normal letters, which is one of the main points in this whole question.
For me, seeing a translation attempt where ‘p’ and ‘f’ are mapped to some plain text character, and this plain text character is not also mapped to other Voynich characters, is crystal clear evidence that it is wrong.
This behaviour for p and f is found throughout the entire manuscript. It is essentially the same for A and B language pages. It is also not a ‘law’ but has enough exceptions to be even more mysterious. There are roughly 3 times more ‘p’ than ‘f’.
The distribution of ‘p’ is: 71% is in first lines of paragraphs, 29% in “all other lines”.
For ‘f’ it is: 75% is in first lines of pararaphs, 25% in “all other lines”.
This difference is not very large, but is also consistent between A and B.
Note that the ratio of words in “first lines” vs. “all other lines” is 1 : 4.2
This last figure is different between A and B language, due to the generally shorter paragraphis in Quire 20.
Rene wrote: “And even if it did, this would rather make the ‘p’ and ‘f’ characters something else than normal letters, which is one of the main points in this whole question.”
Well, that is my whole point! The p/f are for example(!) simply explained as characters or letters not common to the Voynichian language like x,q,y,c in Dutch, or brackets, bold, italic, ,… well any sign used e.g.(!) in dictionaries, encyclopedias,… in first words or lines of paragraphs e.g. to denote properties in short. The remainder of the paragraph would be a description in regular language. Or “flat” as Nick would say. Such whole paragraphs would in any language not be “flat” according to Nick’s “definition”, but he refuses to answer my question about this 4 times already.
There may(!) be something special about p/f but without knowing Voynichian it is pure speculation that it is something “mysterious, unknown to any other language”. Encyclopedia, etc…, display this p/f behavior (of characters or symbols occurring mainly in the first words and lines) all over the world.
So I am not saying the VM must be an encyclopedia. All I am saying is there is nothing “mysterious, unknown to any language”, because all languages have books that show this “peculiar behavior” in some way.
To be clear, let me put it the other way round.
I am convinced without proof 🙂 that if Gulliver’s Travels had been written in Voynichian this whole p/f business would not have appeared. There would not have been starred paragraphs and no countless pages all showing plants, or diagrams, demonstrating repetition in subjects. It is not this “mysterious, unlike any other language” Voynichian, it is the subject and structure, here written in Voynichian, that must be causing these p’s and f’s. The lemmas, paragraphs e.g. each treating a subject referenced in the first line. They can be names, foreign words, places, sacred words,,… having these p/f because of that.
Like e.g. in any language certain reference books use special letters and symbols in the first line for words to be explained further on.
Ger Hungerink: you are confusing “explaining” with “explaining away”.
“Explaining away” = constructing reasons not to look further at something.
“Explaining” = finding specific reasons why something is the way it is.
I think Ger Hungerink is right in principle, I am working on similar lines
And to say that things like that dont happen in contemporary texts is just wrong
I’m looking at one of my favourite tell tale pages, that being f1r with it’s well known deliberate ‘tepenecz’ coffee stain obliterataion that seems not to merrit discussion to our mainstream 15th century medievalists for good reason. So let’s try a more thread relative ‘picture paints a thousand glyphs’ substitute scenario for comment on another aspect entirely.
The first face page consists of four paragraphs; first and last starting with different forms of single leg gallows letters, both being taller than customary and one with extended horizontal arm as opposed to typical double leg ancilliaries as depicted elswhere. I see absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, this format being quite consistant through the manuscript.
What does standout in sending a contrary message, not seen on other pages so far as I’m aware is, that second and third paragraph headers are depictions quite at variance to standard letter substitute characters. Of course they are sketches of a soaring red bird and below it the same creaturel, now wing shot and spiralling to earth dead as a dodo. Anyone have anything to say about my little ‘aberations’?..
Helmut Winkler: if you are putting the work in to actually test out the suggestion, I applaud you. We gain 100x more actual knowledge by trying things than by suggesting things.
John Sanders: I think I covered it well enough here – http://ciphermysteries.com/2019/08/31/revealed-the-voynich-manuscript-and-the-secret-order-of-the-seagull 🙂
Nick: “Well enough” to say no interest in whatever you’re on about I’ll presume. Apart from the ‘dead as a dodo quip’ which I swear was non intended pliagarism in the context of my attempt to infer that a shotgun was the logical cause of death. .
Helmut, what I am saying is that there are no texts in which a particular letter of the alphabet only appears in top lines of paragraphs. Is it that what you are calling “just wrong”? If you are certain that it is wrong, then you should be able to produce an example.
But perhaps you meant something different? Of course there are contemporary texts in which certain symbols appear only at top lines of paragraps or pages, or at the start of lines or paragraphs. However, these are NOT characters of the alphabet. These could be rubrication marks, or they could be ornamental variations or additions to normal characters.
If this is what Eva f and p are, then the way to interpret them can be in two different ways:
1) they should be ignored because they represent a rubrication mark or an ornamental addition
2) they should be replaced by a different character, because they represent an ornamental variation
If anyone presents a Voynich MS text solution that includes one or both of the two above, then I will look at this solution very carefully.
However, this has never happened.
To come back to the important point: please show an example of what you mean, and the mystery will be resolved.
Rene: I beg to offer intervention on behalf of Helmut and Ger by extension with apologies for any impertanance on my part. If you care to check the last paragraph of my penultimate post, you will see the very examples you’ve just suggrsted to Helmut eg. , In f1r at paragraphs three and four, bird (s) figures represent your desired replacement characters 2) and their presence is a standout. Whatsmore the bird’s distinctive red red colouration 1) is a perfect example of your rubrication requirement unless I’m mistaken.
I’ll be looking forward to hearing your thoughts for or agin my modest proposition for resolution.
I know I’m going to regret saying this – not least because it’s so obvious that someone else has surely said it before, but…
” there are no texts in which a particular letter of the alphabet only appears in top lines of paragraphs”
Quite apart from the fact that whether or not “the text” is a “contemporary text” or not – as distinct from one inscribed/copied at a given time, and whether the origin of that posited ‘text’ was in this or that part of the world, you can see even from medieval Christian works that the form given the first letter of a paragraph was habitually different and more ornate than all the rest.
We call them rubricated- and/or ornamental- or inhabited- *initials* for that reason.
And as we’ve seen.. or at least as I too illustrated and explained at some length, the mere presence of elongated ascenders at the top of a page is a strong indication that this ‘text’ wasn’t first composed in the fifteenth-century, or even in the latter part of the fourteenth within mainland western Europe.
But I daresay I may regret making that point again too.
Delving further into the red gooney bird background with Rich Santalacoma as far back as 2010 then in JKP’s own ‘Voynich Portal red bird thread of ’17, it seems that our bird glyphs had ample coverage and were not a figment of my imagination after all. Even Alfred Hitcock would be impressed with the numbers of red bird-like glyph substitues and extensions put to good purpose by scribes of different ethnic origins, since time immemorial by all accounts. I’m pleased that knowledgeable inquiring like minds are out there quitely going about their research business and sharing their unbiased intelligent thoughts with a bunch of red roosters like we.
Nick, so I was clearly “explaining”, not “explaining away”.
I was “finding specific reasons why something is the way it is”. At least trying to.
I gave examples of reasons as to why certain characters, letters, or symbols would mostly appear at top lines or as first word initials. Not asserting that was what it was, but giving examples of the sort of texts in any language (reference books etc.) that produce a similar effect. Showing that there is no reason to claim Voynichian to be mysterious and unique in that respect.
Unless of course you already know what the Voynich scribe actually meant.
Here is an example, not from the VM, where the top line contains special characters simply because the space above top lines of pages and paragraphs leave room for decoration. Considering the numerous examples in the VM where these florishes are abundantly applied at the top lines this may(!) well be a partly explanation.
http://ixoloxi.com/voynich/image/tavolaiv-top.jpg
From:
https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-2394-page-2.html
Here some gallow-like characters only appearing at the top line, or as initial:
https://media.vam.ac.uk/feature/lightbox/v1/album_images/21390-large.jpg
https://media.vam.ac.uk/feature/lightbox/v1/album_images/21396-large.jpg
from:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/the-book-of-hours-louis-xii/
Although “we know” of course they are variations of other letters…
Please be aware this is only an example to show similar behavior in other languages – I am not asserting this is what the VM p’s and f’s stand for.
Rene,
what I was thinking of are things like the Catholicon or the Vocabularius ex quo, but there are full lemmata, of course, insofar it is really a slight misunderstanding
But there are better examples as a parallel to the Gallows, i.e. the abbreviations in legal. mss. for the Commentators, e.g. Ac for Accursius. I think the the author of the ms. did the same thing by creating the Gallows. Your nr. 2 of interpretations should be changed into replacement by a name or a book title.
I think this kind of discussion should be held on VoyNin instead of cluttering up Nicks blog
Ger Hungerink: if your argument is that a particular observed behaviour of Voynichese should not be considered a point of interest because you can conceive (without giving any practical example) of a type of late mediaeval document that exhibits behaviour that is similar to some of the original Voynichese behaviour…
…then I still say you are explaining away rather than explaining.
Nick, nowhere did I say that the p/f behavior is of no interest. I think it is curious and important and might be a clue to get closer to a solution. All I was saying was that the phenomenon is obvious and in my opinion not mysterious or unique and unlike any other language. Unless of course you already know what these p/f stand for.
And I gave general examples. So I was trying to explain (speculate as you called it) that other languages have similar things and not trying to do away with it.
Thanks Helmut for the clarification.
Helmut – Nick’s blog has the advantage of being an open discussion, in a venue which now has almost the status of being a venerable ‘journal’ so to speak.
Voynichnu, like any other forum, is open only to members and for one reason or another such closed member-only environments are less attractive to many, though their interest in the manuscript may be considerable.
Co-incidentally, I find that it’s easy for some people who join a forum to forget that when presenting a ‘new idea’, they may neglect to mention where they themselves obtained it and this can lead to enthusiastic discussions about things long ago known, from the impression that the person who introduces it is starting from some idea of their own. As you see in these two posts from Nick about the ‘gallows’ his wide readership and his own scholarly training often serve quickly to reduces such cumulative confusion – something that I think is all to the good.
Just a thought.