I mentioned in a comment on Koen G’s recent post that I thought that Voynichese benched gallows (i.e. gallows that have a ch glyph struck through them) may well be nothing more complex than a different way of writing gallows+ch; and that I thought this was much more likely than the alternative notion that it was a different way of writing ch+gallows.
When Koen asked me what evidence I had for this, I thought that I ought to write a brief post explaining how I got there (i.e. rather than cramming my “truly marvelous demonstration” into a Fermatian margin). So here goes.
Yes, It’s Contact Tables (Again)
The evidence I’d point to is from (you guessed it) contact tables for glyphs following benched gallows. The notable feature of these I mentioned recently on Cipher Mysteries (though the obeservation is, of course, as old as the hills) is that benched gallows are only very rarely followed by -ch.
Here’s a simple parsed count example (Takahashi transcription), showing how very rare benched gallows + -ch are as compared to both -e and -ee:
| cth 712 | cthe 167 | cthee 23 | cthch 3 |
| ckh 629 | ckhe 222 | ckhee 20 | ckhch 5 |
| cph 147 | cphe 56 | cphee 8 | cphch 1 |
| cfh 59 | cfhe 13 | cfhee 1 | cfhch 0 |
Baseline: (ch 10652), of which (che 4138), (chee 742), and (chch 18)
Furthermore, as I noted in that post, almost all of the places where benched gallows are followed by ch seem to be Takahashi’s transcription errors (sorry Takahashi-san).
Compare and contrast with the contact tables for the preceding glyph, where the ch- instance counts hugely outnumber the counts for e- and ee-:
| cth 701 | ecth 59 | eecth 6 | chcth 139 |
| ckh 501 | eckh 124 | eeckh 9 | chckh 242 |
| cph 177 | ecph 7 | eecph 1 | chcph 27 |
| cfh 54 | ecfh 3 | eecfh 1 | chcfh 15 |
Baseline: (ch 10652), of which (ech 143), (eech 33), and (chch 18)
As a sidenote, the interesting things in this particular table are (a) how rarely benched gallows are preceded by ee- (far less than by just e- or ch-), and (b) how frequently benched gallows are preceded by ch- when ch itself is very rarely preceded by ch-.
So, What’s Going On Here?
I think it’s safe to say that there is probably a really basic reason why benched gallows preceded by ch- are found so much more often than benched gallows followed by -ch. But what might that reason be?
For me, the suspicion is simply that c+gallows+h is just a different way of writing gallows+ch. The contact tables I quote above certainly don’t seem to offer anything to support the alternative scenario where c+gallows+h is a different way of writing ch+gallows.
To my eyes, replacing benched gallows with gallows+ch would match the statistics baseline for che/chee/chch far more closely than replacing benched gallows with ch+gallows would match the statistics baseline for ech/eech/chch. That is, the benched gallows right contact tables (i.e. the contacts that benched gallows have with glyphs immediately following them to the right) seem to me to broadly match the ch right contact tables, but the benched gallows left contact tables don’t obviously match the ch left contact tables.
The big issue here – as always, though – is one of proof. It’s all very well my speculating that it would be better to replace benched gallows with gallows+ch rather than ch+gallows, but how can this be made stronger?
Though I’m not sure that it would be possible to turn this gallows+ch replacement hypothesis into a smoking-gun proof, I do suspect that it could be tested much more rigorously. Perhaps CM readers will have good suggestions about how to carry out a suitable test (or three). 🙂
Finally: Might ch Be Enciphering U?
To me, Voynichese’s various families of shapes and glyph behaviours look (much as John Tiltman suggested) like a grab-bag of contemporary cipher tricks. As a result, it would make a lot of sense to me if the distinctive benched gallows was simply one of the set of slightly older cipher tricks that were artfully combined to form Voynichese.
Along these lines, I’ve previously floated the idea (based mainly on the look of the benched gallows, but also on my long-held suspicion that e/ee/ch/sh might somehow be vowels) that Voynichese ch might in fact encipher plaintext U/V. This is because I can easily imagine that c+gallows+h may have begun its life as an early 15th century steganographic trick used to disguise or visually disrupt QU patterns before being absorbed into the Voynichese Borg mind.
Replacing benched gallows with gallows+ch would be entirely consistent with this idea (though note that the gallows need not necessarily be enciphering Q, even if the trick started that way), so it’s possible that both ideas might turn out to be true simultaneously.
Incidentally: in “The Curse of the Voynich” (p.177), I mentioned a strikethrough trick that appeared in an “otherwise unremarkable” 1455 cipher (Ludovico Petronio Senen) to encipher the Tironian-style ‘subscriptio’ shorthand sign (e.g. that turns “p” into “p[er]”). My speculation here is therefore that the strikethrough trick may have first emerged in this general era, though instead used to visually disguise plaintext U’s.
Hence one thing I have been meaning to do recently is to trawl carefully through Mark Knowles’ fascinating haul of 1400–1450 Northern Italian ciphers to see if there is any indication there that a strikethrough trick was ever used in one of those ciphers to disguise the U in QU pairs. You might have thought that encipherers would have added a special token for “QU”, or might have simply chosen to omit the U after Q: but neither of these options typically seems to have happened in this general timeframe (outside of the most complicated syllabic ciphers).
Hi, Nick:
Now this use of contact tables makes perfect sense. You are trying to figure out if something that appears to be a combination of symbol A + symbol B is taking the place of running AB or running BA in the text. When you see a number of running AB in the text, but very, very few running BA (arguably, none), then it is support for the combination to be taking the place of BA.
As you say, proof is much tougher because, in my opinion, you would have to address the underlying assumptions in your initial question.
Assumptions which include:
1. A and B individually represent the same thing (e.g. underlying plaintext character(s)) throughout the text
2. The AB combination represents the same thing throughout the text
3. Character sense reading is from left to right or from right to left and is not scrambled
4. When A and B are combined, they still represent the same thing as a running version of the two symbols and are not some third thing — of which a number, unfortunately, could be imagined (e.g. a signal for “item” or some other punctuation-type symbol, a signal for a word or phrase from a nomenclature, or is a null)
I’m sure there are others — but I think this gives you an idea of one way the problem could be broken down. And frankly, some of these are starting to look shaky or very, very difficult to address from what we have available even from my limited experience point of view.
That being said, know that I recognize it is much, much easier to critique any hypothesis than it is to actually garner enough data to completely support any position within the VM reading (even something so small as this) where you are to the point that any other reading is so unlikely that it would be seen as “proof.” And I know you know it as well. Thanks for the work in any case.
I agree that [ckh] being a variant/alternative of [kch] makes far more sense than it being a variant of [chk]. I’m not sure that we need to suggest [ckh] is a variant of anything, however. Bench gallows could be a thing in themselves, with a mixture of bench and gallows properties.
The contact tables that need most examination are those which compare [ckh] to [kch]. For proof, I would like to establish some kind of rule where one occurs and not the other. Although variation could be at the will of the writer, I think that case would be harder to prove.
Thanks for your quick reply, Nick, that’s blogging at its best 🙂
I think your argument is a bit more sophisticated than my arguments for bench-gallow, so I will switch to that order in the future.
Benched gallows are a bigger problem for statistics calculations than I thought. The problem is that you can’t just run with EVA there, which is just one of four (well, apparently three) viable options. And if for some calculation involving character frequency you need to involve benches, then you must also choose whether to treat them as one character or not, which in turn forces you to choose what to do with benched gallows.
It would be good already to have a preferable version… but it seems like the jury is still out on unstacking vs. treating them as a thing in themselves.
Michelle & Emma: proof is indeed hard, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make progress. 🙂
I strongly suspect that the next big advances in understanding Voynichese will come from careful and insightful use of contact tables. Contact-fu is something we should all be black belts in by now, wouldn’t you agree?
I should add that it often feels to me as though there’s a very specific kind of analytical tool missing from our collective toolbox, something that helps visually compare between contextual contact tables. I think there’s a strong case for discussing what that tool would look like.
Emma May Smith: a quick apples-to-apples comparison shows that, for the glyph contacts discussed above, c+gallows+h behaves very much like gallows+ch, and behaves very much unlike ch+gallows.
Here’s the right contact table for c+gallows+h (though note that most of the c+gallows+h+ch final column instances seem to be transcription errors):
(cthe 167) (cthee 23) (cthch 3)
(ckhe 222) (ckhee 20) (ckhch 5)
(cphe 56) (cphee 8) (cphch 1)
(cfhe 13) (cfhee 1) (cfhch 0)
Here’s the right contact table for gallows+ch (note the extremely similar proportions to the table above):
(tche 296) (tchee 27) (tchch 1)
(kche 321) (kchee 33) (kchch 1)
(pche 353) (pchee 40) (pchch 1)
(fche 77) (fchee 13) (fchch 1)
And finally, here’s the right contact table for ch+gallows, which essentially bears zero resemblance to either of the two preceding tables:
(chte 7) (chtee 4) (chtch 8)
(chke 16) (chkee 19) (chkch 17)
(chpe 0) (chpee 1) (chpch 14)
(chfe 0) (chfee 0) (chfch 1)
Of course, far more extensive contact tables (and far more subtle comparisons) are needed, but this is hopefully a decent enough starting point for discussion.
Hi Nick, I don’t use Eva because I’m taking a different approach to the logic of the letters and I find I get confused when I mix that with Eva. I’m assuming that you mean the joined double c as a bench and the gallows are… well, gallows! Have you considered “er” and “re” for the bench? My alphabet right now works backwards and forwards, so not only do “er” and “re” as the joined cc appear at beginnings and middles, but also at ends of words if the syllable ends with certain signifiers. So “er” and “re” endings too.
I think this works quite well with what you are saying, actually. Say you have a gallows that stands for P for instance. Stick it in the middle of the bench, and you’ll get pre or per, but after the bench “rep” as in repeat, represent etc. Anyway, could be any combo for the bench I suppose but that’s what’s cropping up for me right now.
Next week’s another matter…