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

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

Wayne Durden wrote:

>  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. 

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

	I don't have time at the moment to do much looking, but I 
don't find this character very Voynich-like, although I do 
understand your reasoning.  The style doesn't seem the same.

	Here are the most gallows-like things we have found:

http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/voynich/image/tavolaiv-top.jpg

http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/voynich/precednt.html

Rafal Prinke has a fuller selection of gallows 
embellishments, but I can't get to his page at the moment to 
get the link.  Most of the gallows embellishments we have 
seen date to 1000-1100, but I have seen a few dating to the 
1300-1400's.

	My thought about French mostly came from its ability to 
decompose into syllables, which a verbose cipher might turn 
into Voynichese.   That would explain the short word length 
of Voynichese.  Problems with this are that the apparent 
vowel-consonant alternation of Voynichese may not be 
consistent with that, and that the VMs contains too many 
(different) words, ~8200.  If it were a verbose cipher, it 
would have to be a homophonic one.

	Of course, a homophonic cipher could explain the difference 
between A and B, which Currier was also the first to 
observe.   However, we are no longer so sure of what the 
observed difference between A and B means.   Gabriel Landini 
did some word that could indicate that the difference is 
similar to that between texts in a known natural language by 
different authors.

> 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.

	Jacques has already commented on this.  Nick, as I 
understand him, believes that Voynichese might be shorthand 
which is then re-enciphered in a verbose cipher, which would 
of course lower the entropy again.  I give a brief 
demonstration of a verbose cipher in my paper on entropy:

http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/voynich/mbpaper.htm

Dennis

______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list