Fw: Back to basics - or musings of an old bore

["John Grove" <John@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oops, I just sent that to Jorge!

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Grove" <John@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2001 8:03 AM
Subject: Re: Back to basics - or musings of an old bore


> This has been my recurring theme from whence I started...
>
> Embarrassingly enough, my first assumption was (based on only two pages) a
> single line musical notational system. This was thrown out when I learned
> that labels abound everywhere in the manuscript and wouldn't likely be
> musical notes. I came up with the concept simply because of the 'design'
of
> the characters can ALL be broken into two parts as Jorge has mentioned
here.
> I've called them 'c' and 'i' strokes vice e and i in previous posts and
have
> attributed the various schemes to various characters like in this
> http://members.tripod.com/~VoynichMs/Rrr.gif
>
> Sorry for the pop-ups on that site. Anyway, that is only one of the
aspects
> of the schema that I've tried to understand in the past. The other is the
> multiple 'e' or 'i' occurances seem to parallel as well - although 'e'
type
> multiples are fewer they do exist.  cccb is four 'c' strokes followed by a
> low-to-high final ligature much like the
> aiin is in my view a 'c' + four 'i' + the same final ligature. The
ligatures
> are common in creating 'd' and 'j', 'r' and 's', 'y' and 'possibly l', 'n'
> and 'b'. They also account for wierdo's when combined in shorter or
multiple
> forms:
> c + i + n = @, c+s+h = sh, c + d + y = wierdo etc...
>
> I've been considering a table where one column is a number of 'c' or 'i'
> from 0-4 and the rows are the end strokes. But this doesn't work when you
> combine end-strokes. Some wierdos exist that look quite clearly (to me) to
> be purely constructed of end strokes - I can't recall where in the book
but
> one that comes to mind is created by the end-stroke of s/r attached to the
> end-stroke 'h' without any 'c' or'i' prefix.
>
> As I've mentioned recently, I'm finding that words that have Gallows in
them
> when replaced with 'd' create valid Voynich words as well - which is yet
> another disturbing puzzle to me.
>
> I've previously tried to address the possibility that ccc + end stroke was
a
> different character than cc + end stroke and c + end stroke with the
> justification that a 'c' or 'i' can never stand alone. The problem is even
> with separating these as separate characters - the vast majority of words
> tend to use only the single 'c' characters in every word daiin - would be
c
> + dstroke + c + 4i + nstroke.
>
> Anyway, this is just repeating where I've been before and am still
puzzling
> over. I think Jorge is right that since almost all characters can be
broken
> into a very small subset of similar strokes is important - just what it
> means is yet another oddity of the 'language' or code.
>
> John.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jorge Stolfi" <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <voynich@xxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Friday, February 23, 2001 7:09 AM
> Subject: Re: Back to basics - or musings of an old bore
>
>
> >
> >
> >     > [Adam McLean:] It seems to me that many of the skilled
> >     > cryptographers on this group have puzzled and worked over the
> >     > Voynich now for many years and yet seem no nearer to cracking
> >     > the code.
> >
> > I would take some exception to that.
> >
> > It is true that much work was spent over the manuscript, but
> > a large fraction of it was wasted because it was based on
> > certain assumptions about the nature of the "code" that
> > are now seen to be dubious at best.
> >
> > The "new" evidence against those assumptions includes mainly the
> > structure of the words, as hinted by the various "paradigms"
> > (Tiltman's, Firth's, Roe's) and expanded in the crust-mantle-core
> > model. It also includes the fact that gallows and non-gallows words
> > occur with essentially the same frequency, and ditto for bench and
> > non-bench words; and the fact that these two traits are essentially
> > independent. Futher evidence is the symmetric distribution of word
> > lengths.
> >
> > This evidence, in particular, seems to rule out the assumption of an
> > alphabetic substitution scheme applied to a "major" European or
> > Near-Eastern language -- even allowing for multiple alphabets or
> > Vigenere-like schemes, redundant substitution, null characters, etc.
> > --- which was the starting point of many past crptographic analysis.
> > To explain the peculiar features of Voynichese listed above, we must
> > now assume either an underlying language that exhibits those same
> > features, or an encoding scheme that generates them as an artifact
> > (or, of course, some combination of the two).
> >
> > As many have remarked, the rigid word structure could mean that the
> > Voynichese "words" are in fact syllables. Thus either we have a
> > "major" language written syllable-by-syllable, or a language with
> > monosyllabic words. (As some of you unfortunately still remember, I
> > once bet some pizzas on this last horse.) One problem with these
> > theories is that there are about 6000 distinct Voynichese words (if we
> > exclude tokens with dubious readings) --- which is way too large for
> > any "major" language, and uncomfortably large even for the most
> > syllable-rich East Asian languages. This particular problem could be
> > solved by assuming a less than perfect encoding, e.g. with pitch marks
> > instead of tone marks, or a fair amount of spelling variation. But it
> > seems hard to believe that a natural language would exibit the
> > observed peculiarties in the gallows and bench frequencies, or the
> > symmetric word-length distribution.
> >
> > So it seems more likely that all those peculiar features of Voynichese
> > words are side effects of the encoding. Substition schemes which
> > insert spaces inside words, such as Gabriel's "daiin dain Latin", may
> > explain the absence of long words, but do not seem able to explain the
> > other features --- unless the substitution strings were specifically
> > chosen to produce those features, which seems most unlikely (they are
> > rather hard to "see", even with computers).
> >
> > At this point, the only encoding I can think of that seems to meet all
> > the constraints is some codebook scheme with "word codes" assigned
> > systematically in a manner resembling to the Roman number system. (The
> > assumption that each Voynichese "word" is indeed a word of the
> > language is supported by Zipf's law analysis, by the "lumpy" and
> > section-dependent distribution of words along the manuscript, and by
> > the observation that labels have the same structure as single words
> > and tend to occur in the text, at roughly the expected places.)
> >
> > The encoding need not be a pure codebook scheme, where each word is
> > independently assigned to a different code. The scheme may, for
> > instance, assign to each lexical *stem* an arbitrary code, which is
> > then modified in some systematic way to indicate gender, number, case,
> > tense, etc. (Note that such a scheme could make the code much easier
> > to read and write.) There are hints, for example, that the EVA <q>
> > glyph may be such a modifier --- since it hardly occurs in labels, and
> > often a label <XXX> occurs as <qXXX> in the text nearby.
> >
> >     > It also seems unlikely to me that someone in the 16th century
> >     > could devise a code that could defeat 21st century methods.
> >
> > If the codebook hypothesis is correct, then it is no wonder that all
> > methods that were designed to crack alphabetic substitution schemes
> > have failed so far.
> >
> >     > But how else can we proceed ? I know I must sound like an old
> >     > bore, always coming back to the same theme, but it seems to me
> >     > that we have not yet exhausted an approach based on seeing the
> >     > context of the manuscript - and relating it to other similar
> >     > material.
> >
> > Indeed. I suppose that to crack a codebook scheme (or to decipher a
> > logographic script) one needs to identify the meaning of a few key
> > words, and proceed from there. That does not seem to be an easy task,
> > even though we happen to have a whole illustrated book whose general
> > subject we vaguely know. (Just try "decoding" an illustrated Chinese
> > herbal, to see how hard that can be.)
> >
> > For instance, there is page f67r2 which, as Robert Firth once pointed
out,
> > seems to list the names of the seven planets:
> >
> >   <okal>  <okain am>  <opcholdy>  <ofar oeoldan>  <ytoaiin>  <yfain>
> >
> > So why can't we go on from there? Well, for starters, we do not know
> > which planet is which. Moreover, of those seven words, <okal> alone is
> > very common throughout the text (~140 occurrences), while the others
> > hardly occur at all (although <okain> alone has ~110 occurrences, and
> > <ofar> ~4). So what does <okal> mean: Moon? Earth? Sun? Venus? Or do
> > we have a case of homonymy here, like between "mercury" the planet and
> > "mercury" the metal? (Other examples abound in other languages, e.g.
> > "mars" is planet and month in French, and "water star" is some planet's
> > name in Chinese.) Or perhaps the seven words are not the planets'
> > names, but some other attributes?
> >
> > There is also the "fallopian tubes" illustration on f77v, where the
> > left and right tubes are labeled <otol shedy> and <otolor> --- both
> > fairly common through the text.   Note that <or> by itself is a very
> > common word (~360 occurrences), and <otolor> also occurs as a label in
> > the seven planets' page, f67r2.
> >
> > So we have no lack of clues; all we need now is a really smart brain...
> >
> >     > http://www.alchemy.dial.pipex.com/tetrabiblos.jpg
> >     > The women figures in the Vatican manuscript are
> >     > coloured. Are they coloured on the similar
> >     > Voynich drawing ?
> >
> > Indeed! Actually, the figurines in both of the two inner circles
> > (clothed and naked) resemble those in the VMs.
> >
> >     > 3. The Voynich script itself. No other example of
> >     > this has yet been found, though some characters
> >     > seem very familiar.
> >
> > The familiarity, I believe, is mostly a coincidence.
> >
> > In fact, most of the VMs alphabet seems to have been generated by
> > systematic combination of a "base stroke" (either <e> or <i>) with one
> > of five or six "plume strokes". Similarly the gallows are combinations
> > of a "left leg" and a "left leg", each chosen among 2 (or 3?)
> > possibilities. Therefore, the occasional resemblances with Roman
> > characters are probably meaningless coincindences: after all, there
> > aren't many different glyph shapes that can be drawn with two simple
> > pen strokes.
> >
> > Speaking of which: a while ago I posted a message calling attention to
> > the above, and to the apparent correlation between the right stroke of
> > each glyph and the left stroke of the following glyph. Has anyone else
> > checked that claim? (I still haven't had time to follow it up
> > properly; perhaps over the weekend...).
> >
> > All the best,
> >
> > --stolfi
> >
> >
>