- Line breaks in the VM do not act like line breaks in a natural text, in that they do not provide evidence of whether the text runs left-to-right or right-to-left.
- Word breaks in Currier A act like word breaks in a natural text, but in Currier B they do not.
- Since my analysis of F81R as a poem was based on the assumption that line breaks and word breaks were natural, yet they turn out not to be natural at all, there remains nothing to support the idea that this page contains a poem.
Better Reading
Pages
Sunday, September 19, 2021
I was Wrong about F81R
How Line Breaks and Word Breaks Behave in Currier A and B
Thursday, September 16, 2021
Currier B aiin and Latin in
In the Latin ISE corpus, the word 'in' is the second most frequent word, and it would be surprising if this word was not among the top ten words of any Latin text of significant length. The word 'in' also has the property that it is rarely followed by another high-frequency word. The reason for this is that 'in' is a preposition, and is therefore usually followed by a noun with high semantic content, and those words are generally lower in frequency than function words.
Despite the fact that it is rarely followed by another high-frequency word, 'in' is commonly preceded by another high-frequency word, particularly 'et', 'est' or 'ut'. This can be seen in the frequencies by which the top ten most frequent words appear together:
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
qokeedy qokeedy
In this post I'll look at similarities between high-frequency qok- words in Currier B and high-frequency qu- words in Latin.
1. Textual Frequency
The prefix qu- is the most frequent two-letter prefix in the Latin ISE corpus, and the prefix qok- is the most frequent three-letter prefix in Currier B.
2. Zipf Rank
The most frequent qok- words in Currier B occupy similar Zipf ranks to the most frequent qu- words in Latin (though the Currier B words have a tendency to have lower Zipf ranks).
3. Reduplication
Some of the qu- words in Latin may be reduplicated, as may some of the qok- words in Currier B:
Sunday, September 12, 2021
Lexical vs. Textual Frequency
Currier B has the high-frequency words qokeedy, qokain, qokedy, qokeey and qokain which raises the textual frequency of the prefix qo- relative to its lexical frequency.
Tuesday, September 7, 2021
Latin Contractions
My efforts to get a copy of The Curse of the Voynich are themselves apparently cursed. The first time I tried to order this book I was at a vacation rental for a month, and discovered that the postal service would not deliver it because the rental had no mailbox. The second time my order was canceled because the book was out of stock. I am hopeful that my third effort will meet with a better outcome.
While I wait for it to arrive, however, I've been looking at one of Nick Pelling's ideas. Did the Voynich cipher employ contraction and abbreviation as part of its process? If so, it seems like this could explain the relatively low amount of information conveyed by Voynichese words. It would be a lossy compression process similar to the removal of vowels, but perhaps more culturally appropriate to the 15th century.
I looked at the 1901 German translation of Adriano Cappelli's Lexicon abbreviaturarum, and it seems that conventions for contraction and abbreviation evolved over time such that by the 14th or 15th centuries scribes were using a number of methods in conjunction, including the use of a small set of symbols borrowed from Tironian notes. In order to understand these processes better, I took thirty random entries from the lexicon and looked at what the scribes chose to keep from the full written word and what they felt they were able to do away with. In general, I found that words could be divided into three parts:
Prefix: The prefix is made of consecutive letters from the start of the word, including at minimum the first letter. In my samples, the prefix is one character long about 53% of the time, two characters about 23% of the time, three characters about 6% of the time.
Infix: The infix is made of of letters that are generally not consecutive, chosen from the middle of the word. Presumably these are letters that differentiate between one contracted word and another. There is roughly 12% chance that a given letter from the middle of the word will appear in the infix.
Suffix: The suffix is made of consecutive letters from the end of the word, except the -m of accusative endings, which is sometimes dropped. The last letter was included in the suffix about 63% of the time, the second-to-last about 30% of the time, the third-to-last about 6% of the time.
What is interesting about this, to me, is that the first letter of each word is always retained. That means, if the Voynich cipher employs abbreviations and/or contractions, and the subsequent steps are only forms of substitution (and not, for example, transposition), then it might be possible to crack the first letters of Voynichese words.
It would be hard to know if you had gotten it right, though!