Re: Voynich research needs

[Rene Zandbergen <rene@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Frogguy quoted Stolfi:


> >     ?1110110           110000000001       11110001
> [snip]
> >     0100110110         10100000           011100110
> >    1101011001         00100010?          ...
> >

> > From previous analysis, I already knew the sequence would contain
> > almost exclusively 1s and 0s; but I was expecting them to be randomly
> > interleaved. Instead, the 1s and 0s tend to be clustered in runs of
> > same value. Said another way, there is a strong correlation between
> > the presence or absence of gallows in adjacent words.

and wrote:

> I had noticed that too, just looking at the transcription,
> how there is a sort of "gallows agreement". My explanation (which
> I never posted here) was that the gallows had no phonetic value,
> but were gender/number markers (feminine singular, feminine plural,
> masculine singular, masculine plural). 

How about the following:
Yesterday I did a very short count of words in an Arabic text
(a modern print of a very old astronomical text, not sure precisely
in which language). I counted the number of  appearances of 'al' 
and got strings of 1's and 0's not unlike the ones above. I never
saw more than three successive '1's in the short sample I looked at,
but longer strings of 0's did occur. This fits my very limited
understanding of Arabic too. 

As to what is reasonable to expect in the VMs and what not (Turkish,
Chinese, Klingon), my personal view is that whatever a person in 
Central or Southern Europe may have had in his hands by the end
of the 15th Century may be something he somehow used as a model.
The middle East and parts beyond are all very well possible.
Of course, postulating something for which we now have no evidence
that it was in Europe as this time makes for a less tenable theory
(but not impossible). 

Finally, those who have ventured into the scans of the catalogue of
books in Rudolf's museum will have seen that R had a large
collection of Turkish books indeed...
  
No, one more thing. I am in more trouble than Stolfi, since I
forgot what I put my pizza bet on. (I still remember what should 
be on my pizza, which clearly shows my priorities :-) ).

Cheers, Rene