Re: Folding keys etc...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Steve,

> D*mn NICK (you are really making this HARD - Ha.haaa)
>              and showing off how poor my communications skill are !!)

You're doing just fine. I'm just grateful your ES didn't pick someone whose 
first language was Hopi - I'd have never decoded it. :-)

OK: I think I ought to describe what I imagine the "key" to look like, so 
that you can correct me and we can move on. :-)

Each of the 8 gallows symbols indicates a particular folding of the key, 
which would open out a pair of matching translation lists. Each of these 
pairs would look like:-

        Gallows#1's pair of lists (7 more pairs elsewhere):-

                Original        Voynichese
                ----------      -----------------
                A       gallows#2
                B       8
                C       4
                D       o
                E       gallows#7
                F       c
                G       i
                H       9
                I       gallows#6
                (etc)

But if there was a long gallows character, with a set of Voynichese 
characters beneath it, where do you "character transfer" them to?

If you scan through the whole document for long gallows, how do you know in 
what order to put the characters underneath them into the lists?

Also: it may sound odd, but when is a gallows a long gallows? I've gone 
through all the online pages I have to hand, and tried to categorise the 
larger-than-normal gallows characters into groups (below): and there appear 
to be many types of long, longish, and just plain large gallows. :-/

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

                                * * * * * * *

Brief "long gallows" taxonomy (very incomplete)
------------------------------------------------------------

Some 7-9 character wide long gallows characters:-
        f48v
        f84v
        f84r
        f87v
        f87r

Some 4-6 character wide not-so-long gallows characters:-
        f09v
        f10v
        f23v
        f75v
        f88r
        f79v (has 4 on the same page!)

The bizarre gallows that appears to have grown eight or nine eyes?!?!:-
        f42v

The gallows at the start of f30v also look a bit curious.

And, ***very interestingly***, there's what looks suspiciously to me like 
an "oops I put a normal gallows in but meant it to be a long gallows" 
correction halfway down on f37v. If this _was_ a correction, it would 
strongly support the theory that there is an intrinsic difference between 
normal and long gallows characters.

There are also many, many pages with what are simply either tall or just 
noticeably larger than normal gallows characters.