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Re: VMs: Follow-up
Hello,
>I'm not sure what you're trying to do with it. If you install the
>LizardTech sidfile viewer & use one of the batchfiles mailed to the list to
>rename the 100620890890203 id numbers to their proper names, you've got
>most of what you wanted, I think. :-)
Thanks for the tip, I will try that! I will of course only write a program if it adds new functionality. The difficulty I experience was this: I noticed some interesting repetitions of a certain label so I wanted to see where it occured in the transcription of the First Study Group. To do that, I first had to match the individual Voynich glyphs with those on the EVA page to find the EVA code. Then I had to convert those EVA code to the FSG codes and then do a textual search with regular expressions from a text-editor. At least the first steps could have been integrated in one application where you can "enter" the glyphs by clicking on their icons, and then the text will appear in EVA/FSG/whatever-you-chose code.
>Erm... isn't that the wrong way round? If anybody could simply decide
>whether it was a hoax or not, we wouldn't have this mailing list. :-o
I think I made myself unclear. What I need is to determine for myself if I think this has a relatively high probability of being non-fake. Of course I can't say anything with certainty (or something close) because then the entire thing would have been solved. Still I can use the available knowledge to make a guess. From your point of view the answer may be obvious but for me it isn't. I'm sure we can agree that almost no matter how much evidence there was for this thing being a hoax, there would still be people around who would insist on it being real and they would create websites, mailing lists etc. And right now I have no way of knowing how many people did that after the discovery of the Cardan grill-method for example - are most people convinced by now and is it only a few people who insist on this containing meaning? So I'm going to review what is available right now and decide if I want to invest my time in it. Of course I can't convince myself about it being a hoax wi!
th
any kind of confidence - but I can at least see if I think it is plausible it's not a hoax (and other people might disagree with my conclusion, and I might of course be wrong).
>> By examining some of the one-word-labels and seeing how they are
>> distributed in the document (there should be more occurences close to the
>> picture) and by collecting repetitions among the same labels in multiple
>> images, one could get hints on the degree to which this document is ciphered.
>
>Not really: by doing that one might get hints as to the degree to which
>this document is trivially decipherable. (An even bigger hint: it isn't).
Ok, so the expected occurence-pattern of the labels are not satisfied? This clearly points to the document being ciphered no matter what the original language was, IMHO. This is new to me and an important clue.
>There's tons of research to read through - but don't forget that if there's
>some kind of "verbose cipher" (for example, "ol", "qo", "dy", etc) at play
>in Voynichese, nearly all analyses to date will have been done on the
>*wrong alphabet* (ie, on the "fake alphabet", not on the "real alphabet").
What would be handy would be some kind of "atomic" transcription of Voynice. By atomic I mean a transcription where in any case there's doubt if two glyphs are connected they are treated as individual glyphs. Of course this is not possible to carry out in practice (unless the individual dots are considered glyphs) however one could try to do this as good as reasonably possible over some assumption on the alphabet-length. Such a transcription would greatly aid the use of computers in examining the problems you mention. Maybe I will do such a transcription myself on a few pages where I think might be particularly valuable.
>Visually, the
>answer seems fairly obvious - "qo", "ol", "al", "ar", "or", "ee", "eee",
>"eeee", "ii", "iii", "iiii", "eo", "dy", "cho". But is this provable? How
>does it affect typical stats (like word-length distribution, etc)?
>Something to think about...
Maybe I misunderstood you in the paragraph above. What I thought you were saying that could be a problem was to know when there is one big glyph or a composition of two smaller glyphs. There seems to be some disagreement here between the various translation-attempts. Your proposed project seems very interesting as well. I agree that we have to try something new. But on the other hand, wouldn't the NSA cryptographers have realised the possibility of a verbose cipher?
As I look at the pictures with labels, I start to suspect the contents of the pictures might not be meaningful in itself. It might be some kind of code that should aid in the decryption of the text (and that's why there are so many label). It seems strange that an author would chose to use nymphs to illustrate concepts of the digestive system etc. Maybe he would use human beings to illustrate something but nymphs?
Another interesting feature: On f75v you see two lines of text labels. The two labels in each column appear to have the same number of glyphs at least most of them appear to (although I'm not fluent in this script yet!) - if it is true for almost all of the labels in that illustration, but not for a few, maybe we are dividing the glyphs in a wrong way (if in fact there is a system). What are your thoughts on this? Are the labels on figures included in (some of?) the transcription and how are they counted?
Thanks for your help and reply!
>Cheers, .....Nick Pelling......
>
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