Re: Voynich research needs

[Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@xxxxxxx>]

> in some variant of the Chinese theory---until a few months ago,
> when I happened to run a simple statistical test (suggested by
> Bradley Schaefer).  If we map each Voynichese word to the number of gallows
> that it contains, we get the following text:
> 
>     ?1110110           110000000001       11110001
>     00000110           11111110           1110100
>     1000?1110          00?10011110        ??100100
>     1110100001         01010000011        00000000
>     01010000011        010010?10
>     111011111          110000101          11110101100
>     111010001          000001000          1110001000100
>     00??1101           10010?10           010101000101
>     11011??0?          000000001          ?11111001010
>     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.

Is there any known linguistic reason for this occurrence?  It
looks somewhat like a behavioral artifact of the writer.  I
think if I were given the task of 'throwing in a null here and
there' I would produce similar patterns because I would be good
about it for a while, then forget for a while, then come back. 
Even using a coin flipping method, I would still exhibit times
when I was good about flipping the coin and when I was bad about
it.  A two cipher system with the a Gallows representing a
change in cipher or a specific gallows representing a certain
cipher might produce the same result as the writer got lazy
about switching.  If the gallows are just ornate versions of
letters I put in when I was in the mood, a similar pattern might
still appear. I've even seen people online typing Chinese pinyin
who do the same thing with numbers at the end to mark tones,
although a further element is thrown in because at times they
break a toneless run because the pinyin needs a tone to be
clear.  Perhaps there is a non-linguistic behavioral study that
might point out patterns similar to the appearance or lack of
the gallows.  Beyond the runs, it's interesting to see that if
the gallows is a habit of some kind, the writer seems better
about it in all of the places you might guess, labels,
beginnings of paragraphs and lines, etc.

Regards,
Brian Farnell