VMs: VMS Re: to Dennis re: why French - Charrette Project similarities

[Wayne Durden <wdurden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 3/26/05 1:16 AM, Dennis at tsalagi@xxxxxxxx wrote:

> Welcome, Wayne!
> 
Dennis:

Thank you for your welcome.  I appreciate your comments and questions and
will follow up on some of the other points soon.  I especially appreciate
you mentioning Currier as I had not yet found it.

There are several reasons why I initially suspected it could be French,
similar to ones you mentioned, but one thing which firmed up the possible
French connection to me is alphabet similarity to a manuscript studied in
the Charrette project at Princeton.  I went looking for old French texts at
one point and this was one source.  Interestingly, for the same story, the
contemporaneous version is lost, but there are eight separate versions
captured in the next century by different scribes.

While browsing those texts, with the idea of adjusting an alphabet, some of
the characters I saw there jumped out as having some similarity to the
voynich alphabet, although written more formally.  The version that
subjectively seemed to strike me as having the most similarites is the Guiot
manuscript, referred to as the C Manuscritp.   In particular each line has a
leading character which to my eye looked a little like Voynich, while on the
whole, the body text didn't create that overall impression at all.  However,
I was really just browsing to see if I could see any examples anywhere like
the gallows characters, and there are some that have characteristics like
the stranger characters in the VMs.

 Here is a link to the text at Princeton as I would welcome your thoughts.
(the leading character on line 14 of the middle column at the following link
was what initially really just stood out to me as related to the gallows
style characters).  I would be interested in your impression...  To me this
character is often line leading in Voynich.  Somewhat disappointly, in the
Charrette project it is translated to a paragraph symbol.

http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/jpegs/C-27r.jpeg


Fortunately these documents have been largely translated to French in modern
characters here:

http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/L-1C.html
(for the middle column of the jpeg page cited above)

What struck me was the vast variety of the scripts across the eight volumes.
If you want to just subjectively browse these old French texts you can enter
the directory:

http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/jpegs/

and crawl the the images.

I subjectively intuit some similarites in parts of the alphabet in the A
version as well, i.e. here:

http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/jpegs/A-202r.jpeg

That page also struck me because I was looking for examples of script with
"T" having a double stem because I felt the double stem gallows character
was the symbol for a single "T" sound as in the EVA alphabet and unlike the
Bennet alphabet.  The first character on line 15 is translated to "T" and it
has a double stem in the sense that the stem is shaped like a "U".  Truly
amazing the script varieties in old french text!



It's a big leap to see alphabetic script or glyph similarities, and jump
from there to intuiting french language in the text, and I suspect the
greatest reason I intuit French is I "see" the word "san" on some of those
plant folios where I see end structure similarity, i.e. 10, 3, etc.   I also
noted that after reviewing the Charrette texts, there is translation of
characters into modern M and N forms where the scribe seems to have captured
an extra hump for N yet the translators called it an N rather than M.  This
was significant to me because it gave me examples elsewhere in known text
where two distinct looking glyphs may in fact sometimes truly be a mistake
on N or M forms, and possibly in the gallows characters as well.

As to entropy, I will go back and study the concept as used for manuscript
analysis a little more closely.  The frame of reference I was coming from
involves my experience with court reporters.  There are several forms of
take down, and now in my locale the court reporters' machine instantly
translates to plaintext for us on the fly.  In the period about 12 years
ago, the court reporters used a miniTypewriter like machine that spit out a
folding tape about 2 to 3 inches wide.  Several times during depositions a
"readback" would be requested and the court reporter could generally refer
to the tape and produce an accurate readback.  I recall looking at the tape
on one instance and not being able to make heads nor tails of it.  The court
reporter explained the take down was a method of phonetic short hand, and I
believe some type of chordic phoneme capture.  It struck me that her methods
involved far less movement than full out typing (which of course is the
point of it all) and the tape appeared to have far less variety upon it, and
yet she could read back the interrogation accurately, including things like
proper names and specialized terms.

I was thinking that this kind of take down would have the same information
content as plaintext with fewer glyphs and to my amateur mind I was thinking
this would be less entropic because there would be "less scattering".  I was
interpreting this idea to an ignorant scribe doing a phonetic takedown.  I
was thinking there might be less entropy because even though there may not
be self consistency for the same words at times because the scribe didn't
know the words, on the whole similar sounds like "deau" and "teau" might be
reduced to "do" in a phonetic takedown in a made up alphabet.  I admit I
know little of this concept of the entropy in a text and was approaching it
from a layman's standpoint for these ideas.

Again, thank you for your thoughts!

WLD


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