Re: VMs: Faces at the roots

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

Wayne Durden wrote:

> >     If Wayne is right about 52 unique labels, though, I think there 
> > are more than 52 recipe paragraphs.

	As Nick noted, there are 403 known ones, plus 60-70 more.

> Just to be clear, it isn't that there are 52 unique labels, there are 
> far more than that.  I have 1031 unique labels and that's after 
> discarding the first 5 or 7 from stolfi's list that have asterisks for 
> weirdo untranscribed characters.  There just happened to be 52 labels 
> that were used as labels in more than one section of the manuscript.  52 
> that could be compared in context with more than one type of drawing in 
> other words. 

	That's still within striking distance of ~470.  Too, it 
wouldn't necessarily be the case that *all* labels referred 
to a recipe paragraph.  This seems well worth pursuing.

	The question remains of which characters are distinct 
glyphemes and which are (multiple) alloglyphs of one 
glypheme.  Therefore, some labels that appear distinct may 
not be.

	I will re-iterate just one aspect of interpretation.  There 
are some problems inherent in how we do transcriptions.  I 
may be missing something, but the ST transcription, JSA, and 
EVA seem to concentrate on the strokes and not pay attention 
to how they are connected.

	In the Latin alphabet, /ii/ is two vertical strokes, /u/ is 
two vertical strokes joined at the bottom, and /n/ is two 
vertical strokes joined at the top - and all of these we 
know are separate glyphemes.  In the extreme case, the ST 
transcription, JSA, and to some extent EVA, would transcribe 
all these the same, as /ii/ - obviously incorrect!  So 
connections are just as significant as strokes.  We would 
like to ignore the connections in Voynich script, perhaps 
because we don't understand the meaning of the split gallows.

	This was my point with the difference between EVA /iin/ on 
one hand, and Currier /M/, /IN/, and /IID/ on the other.  If 
one uses Currier, there is a way of indicating whether the 
three strokes are linked or not and how, whereas with EVA 
there is no way, unless one uses the capitalization rules or 
parentheses, which one typically doesn't.   In most cases 
Currier /M/ will be the correct interpretation, but the 
principle remains.  The real question is: how significant is 
it?  We could get an idea for this particular case by 
looking for word-terminal instances of Currier -M, -IN, and 
-IID in the older Currier and FSG transcriptions.

Dennis

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