Re: New Voynich Order

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene Zandbergen)]

In response to both of John's contributions:

> An early owner of the VMS was carrying the loose sheets of vellum and
> tripped, dropping the sheets into a confusing pile. He was able to put most
> of the obvious pages back in some semblance of order....

This early owner could even be the author (or copyist), if he didn't
actually know what he was writing.  

> First, I think we could put all the Herbal-A pages in one section and
> all the Herbal-B in another. 

Note that there are two odd things, and they are somehow complementary:
the herbal section is split in two: a large part in the beginning and a 
shorter part near the end. It is also split in another way: it's written
in two different languages, most of it in 'A' but some in 'B'. It seems
quite possible that the B pages in the first half and the A pages near
the end were simply swapped.
  
> Further to my last, I just realized that the Pharma section is all language
> A and therefore belongs either preceding or following Herbal-A in my new
> ordering schema.

Exactly!
 
>  Thus:  Herbal-A, Pharmaceutical - both in language A followed by...

So far so good. The Pharma section shows a different dialect of 'A' 
language. (To a lesser extent these differences are also noticable in
the
herbal A pages near the end of the MS).  It also introduces 'labels' and
'foldout pages'. That's why I would put the cosmo/astro/zodiac sections
after pharma-A (they're all on foldout pages and are loaded with
labels).
It may be due to the presence of the labels, but the language
of these sections is neither A nor B. It shares the characteristics of
both.
How about calling this 'L'-language? 

After that should follow the three major 'B' sections, which are
different
among themselves, but not very much. They have no foldout pages, and
only
Bio-B uses labels. 

Of course, it is entirely possible that the gradual change in language
should not be correlated with the 'position' in the book - the pages
may not have been written in order.
Note also that only the herbal-B pages show a different hand (I think
the technical term is 'ductus'). Much more cursive but not necessarily
by a different person. I thus don't fully agree with Currier's
correlation
of languages (A / B) and hands (1 / 2).

What we're left with is the mysterious quire which has some herbal, 
some cosmological and some 'stars' pages (fols. 57-66 of which several
are
unfortunately missing). Finding out how exactly this fitted into the 
MS could be important. Note also that the two stars pages (fol.58) are
in A language as opposed to the stars section which is in B. Still, they
share the odd behaviour of the word 'qokeey' which I have commented on 
before.

>     I also noted that Jorge's plot of 2 May 1998 showed "three fairly
> compact clouds that are largely disjoint but still adjacent" (to Bio) and
> these broke up into Herbal-A and Pharma being the farthest from the Bio
> section, while Stars were the closest, and the remaining sections made up
> the third cloud of Herbal-B, Astro, Cosmo and Zodiac.

Here I have to mention my own scatter plots which are based on a
different
statistic (namely digraphs) and which show a contiguous cloud with
clearly
delineated sections (www.voynich.nu/curabcd.html, under reconstruction).
I am not saying that my plot is correct and Jorge's is wrong: they show
two
different things. It is fair to say that we have not yet agreed on an
explanation for this discrepancy.

Checking whether there is any systematic behaviour in the gallows
bit strings over these sections could be very interesting indeed.

Cheers, Rene