Re: Correlation between text and pictures

[Rene Zandbergen <rene@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Stolfi wrote:

> > [Rene:] Of course, there is a very strong point against
> > [text-picture] correlation: the Herbal-A (HeA) and -B (HeB)
> > pages have the same type of illustrations, yet vastly different
> > text statistics. If we want to maintain that the HeA and HeB
> > text are about the same subject, we have a few difficult
> > questions to answer.

> I don't think it is such a strong argument. There is no
> reason to believe that the pages were written in the 
> order they are now bound; and several good reasons to believe
> that they weren't 

What really matters here is the latter, and I agree, although
I wonder about the quire numbers. These seem older than the
page numbers and I really wonder if it would be reasonable for
a later owner (who could not read the MS and therefore
mixed up the pages) to write quire numbers... They would
have become superfluous by that time, wouldn't they?

In any case, I agree with the possibility:

> If we assume that HeA and HeB were written at different times, with a
> gap of months or years between them, it is quite possible that the
> differences in vocabulary are due to a change of style, which could be
> due to several reasons. 

...even though we lack strong evidence for this.

> I don't think this is exceptional.  I have seen such page-specific
> words in other sections, too.  Many words occur several times
> on a certain page, or on two consecutive pages, then are absent 
> on other pages.  The following listing of the VMS text highlights
> some of those words:

All of these are good candidates for being subject-matter-dependent
words. The special bit about fol58 and the stars section is that
they are so far apart, and their connection is not as obvious
as some herbal pages. Also, it is not just the presence of one
word, but the fact that it is sometimes frequent, sometimes absent.
What I'm imagining is that this is a weather almanac section and
the word means rain, or a geography section (list of cities) and the
word means river or coast.
Something like that....

By the way, I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but on
f57r (a herbal page, on the reverse of the famous circular diagram
with the four sequences) the two paragraphs have very different
'language/style/dialect/spelling'. The page is marked as 'B'
but they're very differenct kinds of 'B'.

> So this is just one more aspect in which Voynichese looks like
> a typical natural language...

Many possible types of 'encoding' could preserve this structure.
So in the sense that it makes it look like a normal meaningful
text, I fully agree.  

Cheers, Rene