Page 81R of the Voynich Manuscript has a block of text with an interesting property that is different from other text in the VM. While most lines of text in the VM continue to a page margin or the boundary of an image, the text on 81R is ragged on the right side. In other texts, both printed and manuscript, this type of raggedness can be a property of poetry, wherein the breaks between lines are guided by metrical considerations rather than the need to use space on the page efficiently. Nick Pelling has a post that digs into this page, and he notes that the poem-like layout of this page was observed by Gabriel Landini on the Voynich mailing list in 1996.
So, if 81R contains a poem, then what kind of information could we derive from it?
Generally speaking, a line of poetry is broken down into feet, and feet have some relationship to syllables, though the exact nature of that relationship varies. In Latin and Greek dactylic hexameter, for example, a foot is made of two poetically long syllables (a spondee) or else a long syllable and two short ones (a dactyl), and there are six feet per line. In iambic pentameter a foot is made of one unstressed and one stressed syllable (an iamb) and there are five feet per line. Other styles of poetry use other definitions of feet and other numbers of feet per line.
Whatever definition there is to a foot and a line, however, there is going to be some natural relationship between the length of the line and the number of syllables in it. For a given language and a given metrical form, that will lead to a certain average number of words per line, with a certain standard deviation.
These values are different for different languages and metrical forms. In the graph below, I have taken multiple 31-line samples from five epic poems and graphed the average number of words per line (x axis) against the standard deviation in number of words per line (y axis).
In the graph above, you can see that each of these epic poems has a different average number of words per line. Chaucer is by far the highest, while the Serbian epic poem Strahinja Banović is at the extreme other end.
If the number of words in a line of Voynich text is equal to the number of words in a line of the underlying plain text, and the text on 81R is a poem, then where does it fall on this graph?
There is not universal agreement on where all of the wordbreaks are on 81R, so we have a range of answers, but it is a relatively narrow range, and the answer is relatively clear. Among the five sample epic poems, the most similar in this respect is the Aeneid. The three red bubbles in the graph below demonstrate the range of values for page 81R, and the blue bubbles are the sample values from the Aeneid.
The next most similar poem is the Anglo-Norman Voyage de Brendan, the right edge of which touches the left edge of the Voynich range:
This suggests the possibility that 81R is written in Latin dactylic hexameter, or else possibly something like the Anglo-Norman octosyllables of Voyage de Brendan.
The argument for Latin dactylic hexameter is strengthened over something like Old French by the fact that there are 31 lines on 81R. Old French poetry (like Middle English) was built on rhyming couplets, and to have an odd number of lines would mean having a line dangling at the end with no rhyme.
Of course, the VM is not a simple substitution cipher, and it's always possible that a Voynichese word does not correspond to a plaintext word, but this is a direction I will hopefully expand on more in my next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment