RE: VMs: Astronomical Notes, Comments, and Replies

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- John Grove <John@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 	You had my hopes up there for a bit!

Hope is what we need :-)

So here's one of the reasons why I think that the
VMs does not contain arbitrary garbage but carries
information (I hesitate to call it 'useful' 
information). And it is precisely in the names
of the zodiac labels.
The main text of the VMs follows Zipf's law.
This means that when the words are sorted by
decreasing frequency, the frequency curve has a 
certain shape.
If one makes the same curve for the zodiac labels,
it does not fit the Zipf law at all. The curve
is far too flat, i.e. there are not nearly
enough repetitions. This means that the words
of the zodiac label are not part of a running
text, but are idividual items. They could well
be numbers, or coordinates, or names.

Note that there are 299 of them, if one includes
the central star in Pisces, but one nymph in Gemini
(I think) does not have a label. 

By the way, it is far more likely that the zodiac
labels refer to the degrees of the zodiac, not
the days in the year. There are lots of ME
documents which have 12 circular zodiac images
with 30 items per image, and there is
no doubt about what they mean.
See e.g. Leo and Scorpius at the bottom of
http://www.voynich.nu/extras.html

Cheers, Rene

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