The {8am} strategy

[DFS346]

Thoughts on what I call the {8am} strategy: meaning a focus on the v101 "word" {8am} as a test case for mapping from the Voynich manuscript to natural languages.

https://goodreads.com/author_blog_posts ... m-strategy

{8am} mappings to Italian OVI 02.jpg (27.41 KiB) Viewed 2274 times

A series of mappings of [8am} from various transliterations of the Voynich manuscript (of my own devising) to medieval Italian, as represented by the OVI corpus. Author's analysis. H1 = “herbal” section, parts A and B. D1 = Scribe 1 (per Dr Lisa Fagin Davis). RSQ = correlation coefficient between glyph and letter frequencies. AFD = average absolute difference between glyph and letter frequencies.

[DFS346]

Further thoughts on the {8am} strategy, for identifying or at least filtering the presumed precursor languages of the Voynich manuscript.

https://goodreads.com/author_blog_posts ... -revisited

{8am} mappings AR EN IT.png (12.6 KiB) Viewed 1421 times

Selected mappings of the "word" {8am} to words in some medieval European languages. Author's analysis

[DFS346]

Further results of the {8am} strategy: mappings of {1oe} and {2c9}:

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_p ... -languages

[8am} {1oe} {2c9} AR EN IT.jpg (147.96 KiB) Viewed 1314 times

Selected mappings of the "words" {8am}, {1oe} and {2c9} to words in selected medieval languages. Author's analysis.

[DFS346]

Further results of the {8am} strategy for mapping the Voynich manuscript: now including mappings of selected "words" to medieval Galician as represented by the first printed edition of Crónica Troiana, published in 1490, and to medieval English as represented by the full text of the Auchinleck manuscript, published in the 1330s.

https://goodreads.com/author_blog_posts ... -languages

As a corpus of reference for the mapped Galician words, I used Corpus Xelmirez (https://ilg.usc.gal/xelmirez/), a corpus of medieval Galician developed by Dr Xavier Varela Barreiro of the Instituto da Lingua Galega in Santiago de Compostela. The website of Corpus Xelmirez does not indicate how many words are in the corpus; it's probably several million. I recently visited the Instituto da Lingua Galega. I have resumed correspondence with Dr Varela Barreiro.

{8am} {1oe} {2c9} AR EN GA IT.png (33.49 KiB) Viewed 740 times

Selected mappings of the "words" {8am}, {1oe} and {2c9} to words in selected medieval languages. Author's analysis.

There is a prior manuscript edition of Crónica Troiana, dated 1393, written by Fernán Martis as a translation from the French Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure . I have a scanned pdf of the Martis manuscript; it has OCR text but the OCR is not usable. From a comparison of the first pages of the 1393 and 1490 editions, it's clear that the printed edition expanded the earlier abbreviations and concatenations, for example:

• "oconto" in 1393 became "o conto" ("the story") in 1490

• "q̃ndolles" in 1393 became "quando lles" ("when to them") in 1490.

Cronica Troiana f09r-01-06 1373 & 1490 RevB.jpg (188.34 KiB) Viewed 692 times

Crónica Troiana, first page of text (folio 9r), lines 1-6, from 1393 manuscript and 1490 printed edition.

I have reconstructed a digital text of the Martis 1373 manuscript by identifying some of the common abbreviations and concatenations, and reverse-engineering them from the 1490 printed edition. The resulting digitised text of the 1373 manuscript should permit an alternative calculation of the Galician letter frequencies, and thereby an alternative mapping from Voynich glyphs to Galician letters.

[DFS346]

Some further thoughts on the frequencies of doubled letters in medieval European languages, and how we might reconcile these frequencies with the apparent rarity of doubled glyphs in the Voynich manuscript.

https://goodreads.com/author_blog_posts ... ed-letters

EUR doubled letter frequencies.jpg (94.97 KiB) Viewed 645 times

The frequencies of the most common doubled letters in selected medieval European languages. Frequencies are calculated as counts of bigrams, divided by total counts of letters in the respective corpora. Author’s analysis.