A common idea for the analyses of the Voynich text is that it is enough to look only into some statistics to learn something about the Voynich text. This way the Voynich text is handled as a black box. For instance Sterneck et al. write "statistical approaches offer a novel way of analyzing the Voynich blackbox. Statistical methods offer tools that capture relevant features of the text without understanding its meaning, and more importantly, allow a certain degree of flexibility with the accuracy of the transcription itself" [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. et al., p. 1].

The problem with this type of black box research is that for learning something about the Voynich text it is required to interpret statistic results with the Voynich text in mind. Furthermore for using a statistic method like Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, or Topic modeling it is often required to check if all necessary requirements are fulfilled. For instance many statistic methods expect some level of consistency across the text. But without knowing the text itself it gets unnoticed that the Voynich text isn't homogenous and therefore doesn't fulfills this requirement.

For instance the paper of Sterneck et al. warns that "topic modeling relies on word frequencies and expects consistency across texts" [Sterneck et al., p. 4]. The paper assumes that it would be enough to "consider the topic distributions in conjunction with Currier language" [Sterneck et al., p. 4]. However if we look into the text itself it becomes evident that "no obvious rule can be deduced which words form the top-frequency tokens at a specific location, since a token dominating one page might be rare or missing on the next one." [Timm & Schinner, p. 3]. Sterneck et al. are not aware of this problem and interpret their statistical results in the context of a hypothetical homogenous text. They conclude "We find that computationally derived clusters match closely to a conjunction of scribe and subject matter (as per the illustrations)" [Sterneck et al., p. 1].

Claire Bowern then uses this interpretation of their statistic results to argue that it is possible to explain the difference between Currier A and B as "two methods of encoding at least one natural language" [Bowern and Lindemann, p. 289], and other differences within the Voynich text as "This result suggests that different scribes may have used different encipherment strategies or written about different subjects" [Bowern and Lindemann, p. 303]. 

Is it indeed possible to explain the variation within the Voynich text this way? What does their statical results mean in the context of the Voynich text?
- In Currier A 0.32% (36 out of 11348 = 0.32%) of the word tokens contain the sequence 'ed'.
- In the Cosmologial section already 9.5% (257/2691 = 9.55%) of the word tokens do use the sequence 'ed'.
- In Herbal in Currier B there are 16.3 % (528/3233=16.3%) of the word tokens containing 'ed'.
- In Quire 20 (Stars - Currier B) the number is 19.4% (2073/10673 = 19.4%).
- And for Quire 13 (Biological - Currier B) the number is 27.9% (1925/6911 = 27.9%).

After Claire Bowern it is possible to explain the differences between Currier A and B as the result of "two different encoding methods", the differences between different hands "with scribal differences and with different subjects" and the differences between different illustrations with different subjects. However the differences for EVA-'ed' between Herbal B and Quire 13 are with 16.3% vs. 27.9% as dramatic as the difference between Currier A and Herbal B (0.32% vs. 16.3%). But after Lisa Davis the Herbal B part as well as the whole Quire 13 are written by the same hand (16.3% vs. 27.9%). The difference between Herbal B and Quire 20 is with 16.3% vs. 19.4% even smaller whereas both sections did use different illustrations and after Lisa Davis also different hands. Claire Bowern interpretation of their statistical results obviously doesn't fit with the Voynich text.

Let's look also at the distribution of a single word type. Let's take EVA-'shedy' as an example.
- EVA-'shedy' only occurs once in Herbal A (1/10616 = 0%)
- it is the 12 most frequent word in Herbal B (35/32333=1.1%)
- it is the 10th most frequent word in Quire 20 (113/10673=1.05%)
- it is the second most frequent word in Currier B (395/20817 = 1.9%)
- it is the most frequent word in Quire 13 (247/6911=3.56%)
- it is the most frequent word for folio 103v (15/449 = 3.34%), but it doesn't occur on folio 105v (0/390 = 0%)

The frequency counts for Herbal A and B and for the quires behave as the counts for 'ed' would suggest. However the counts for individual folios also differ. How can we explain the word counts for 'shedy' on folio 103v and 105v? Both folios belong to Quire 20, they both share the same illustration type and after Lisa Davis also the same scribal hand, but the difference between both folios is with 0% vs. 3.34 % as dramatic as between Currier A and Quire 13. Therefore none of the three explanation attempts used by Claire Bowern does fit in this case. 
Note: The distribution of 'shedy' is not an exception. Even for EVA-'daiin' it is possible to point to pages without a single instance of 'daiin' (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

This means that even by applying three different explanation attempts ("different encoding methods", "different scribal hands", and "different topics") it is obviously not possible to explain the properties of the real Voynich text in a satisfactory way. So if you want to apply some statistic methods to the VMS you should also ask yourself: Can I apply this method to the Voynich text and what does my results mean in the context of the Voynich text?

As the International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript draws nearer, I suddenly find myself wondering what an oral conversation about research into the text would (or could, or should) sound like.

EVA is often described as "pronounceable," and I see that there's been some discussion of this point, mainly here -- 

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-- but many of its distinctions would be difficult to pronounce unambiguously, other than by uttering the names of the individual letters.  So, for example, I imagine most speakers would tend to pronounce [qo] and [ko] identically, or [dain] and [daiin].  Likewise, [qokedy] and [qokeedy] might sound the same depending on what point of reference one uses for [e] and [ee].  And then there are rare sequences such as [iy], which I think I'd personally tend to pronounce the same as [i] or [y].  Plus, if I say something that sounds like "dee" in English, should I be understood as meaning [d] or [dy]?

By planning ahead, I suppose a presenter could show a word onscreen and indicate it while saying "THIS word" or "THAT word," but that option wouldn't be available to someone in a Q&A session.

Meanwhile, even using the names of EVA letters might be assuming too much about the status of EVA as a standard scheme:

"Notice that both of these words end with 'why' [y]....."
"No, that's a 'nine' [9]!"
"You mean 'gee' [g], don't you?"
"Excuse me, but that's actually *two* glyphs...."

So how have people handled this kind of situation in the past, either in formal presentations or just in informal conversation over coffee or phone?

I could imagine devising a reasonably unambiguous pronunciation of EVA, for example by inserting a glottal stop between adjacent vowels, assigning [q] to /kw/, and so on, but I'm afraid that any unilateral move like that could cause more confusion than it would avert.

Of course EVA doesn't equal Voynichese, and all that.  I'm only wondering whether there's any prospect of communicating orally about the text among ourselves as efficiently as EVA lets us communicate about it in writing (no more, no less).

Dear all,

Siloé, the Spanish company who produced the official Voynich MS facsimile, are based in Burgos, Spain.

Some years ago, they already opened their Voynich café, but in addition to that, last weekend they opened their "Voynich Museum".

So, if you're ever in the northern half of Spain, this is the place to visit.

   
   
   
   
   

   

The herb section represents the Bible. Previous post with this idea was You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 
I will develope it in this thead.

The first folios are the Genesis 1 and 2. I will show in this post the Genesis 1, days one to five of the creation.
 
Genesis text taken from:
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[1:1] In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,
[1:2] the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
[1:3] Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.
[1:4] And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
[1:5] God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
 
f1r, day 1:
Without drawing. At the benginning there was nothing.


[1:6] And God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters."
[1:7] So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so.
[1:8] God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
 
f1v, day 2:
Yellow leaves are the light-Day.
Green leaves are the darkness-Night.
In right and left branches, green and yellow leaves are mixed.
In the middle branch yellow leaves are on the right and green leaves on the left.


[1:9] And God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so.
[1:10] God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.
[1:11] Then God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so.
[1:12] The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good.
[1:13] And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
 
f2v, day 3
The plant is a water lily or a nenufar, an aquatic plant.
The leave represents the water gathered into one place, the flower represents the dry land.


[1:14] And God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years,
[1:15] and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth." And it was so.
[1:16] God made the two great lights - the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night - and the stars.
[1:17] God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth,
[1:18] to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.
[1:19] And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
 
f3v: day 4.
The leaves have 4 points.
The flowers are painted in dark blue, color used for heaven and God.
The greater flower is the sun, the smaller one is the moon.


[1:20] And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky."
[1:21] So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
[1:22] God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth."
[1:23] And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
 
f4v: day 5.
Leaves are birds flying. There are 3 stars and the flower is the moon.

I will appreciate any suggestion relationing herbal folios with passages of the bible.

I don't remember if we discussed this previously, but this is the matter that I've been thinking of recently.

By "orphaned vords" I mean vords that do not follow the preceding vords immediately, but are preceded by a large gap instead. The quickest example are endings of paragraphs in f1r, sometimes suggested to be "chapter headings".

Again, there must have been some established term for those pieces of script, but, failing to recall it, I quickly invented the handy designation of "orphaned vords".

So, the foremost question is of course why they are orphaned at all. However, I do not touch this question here. Suppose they are for a reason. But the second question is why they are aligned as they are - and they are aligned in a seemingly inconsistent fashion.

Consider f8r. In paragraphs 2 and 3, okokchodg and dchol saim, respectively, are perfectly right-aligned. This looks somewhat "natural", so we could expect other orphaned vords to be aligned in the same fashion. But then in paragraph 1 dcho daiin is not right-aligned, although nothing prevents it to be.

I considered the possibility that the width of the gap must be constant. But neither in plain distance nor in the number of characters that one can fit into, the gap widths in the three paragraphs do not match.

What might be the rule here?

Rrrrriped from the pages of history.... It's new to me.

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It's interesting for several reasons. It fits the VMs C-14 chronology. Its geography is a reasonable possibility.
There were Sisters of the Common Life as well as Brothers. And it is noted in several articles that they were in the book trade. Plus they had their own linguistic dialect Ijssellands.

More likely, perhaps, than the Sisters of Rum (Ottoman and Sufi connections).

Looking at the Astronomical/Cosmological (Quires 9 and 10) section ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )
i noticed a pattern, well a voynich pattern
i.e when you think you have found a pattern but on closer inspection, the count is off by one or theres an exception.
It happens so often that in darker moments one thinks that it is intentional.

Images with a face in the centre have 2 pages separating them (except the last which has 3).

f67r1  -  Face in centre
f67r2  -  Star in centre
f67v2  - Star in centre
f67v1  -  Face in centre
f68r1  -  Sun + Moon
f68r2  -  Sun + Moon
f68r3  -  Face in centre
f68v3  - T-O map in centre
f68v2  - Star in centre
f68v1  - Face in centre
f69r  -   Star in centre
f69v  -  Star in centre 
f70r1  - Star in centre
f70r2  - Face in centre

Some speculative thoughts:
The Faces symbolize Planets.

f67v1 is Jupiter aka Zeus because he looks a bit godlike with his aura and well drawn face

f68r3 is Venus  because of the 7 stars, pleiades + Venus have a cycle together

f67v2 Swirly star is the Pole star,  possible T-O map bottom left

If anyone has any links or blog posts about this stuff that would be great.
No doubt other folks have suggested similar things but i cannot find any information.

I think Wilfred Voynich's will is not online or in print. Is that correct?  Thanks!

On this page of Rene's site (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) the conclusion is that Voynich words have similar entropies to comparator languages, but that the entropy is distributed differently. Specifically, there is less information at the start of a word but more toward the end.

My question is whether this conclusion is only for left to right reading or would be true when examined in either reading direction. What I mean is this: do Voynich words have more information specifically on the right hand side (so toward the end in normal reading direction) and less information on the left, or is it that any 4-gram within a word would have a higher level of information?

(I guess it is the latter, as many words are longer than 4 characters.)

An interesting bit of historical etymology I saw recently, that might connect with the VMs. As usual, the devil is in the details. So, let's look at the details and try to find the little devil. And there he is, on f67v1, in the lower right.

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It's the smiley face with the pointy hat.

John Duns Scotus, (d. 1308) was a medieval philosopher and theologian on a level with Aquinas and Ockham. Incidental to all that, he is known to have promoted a sort of long, conical hat - a "thinking cap". He taught at Oxford and Paris, then briefly at Cologne, before he died.

By the mid-1600s, he was somewhat too conservative and out of date. And this is when the change took place from Duns' cap to dunce cap. However, from the perspective of the VMs C-14 parchment dates, this change had not happened yet. So, the cap must be considered in a favorable interpretation, and potentially a subtle reference to Duns Scotus, himself.

A couple other points of potential connection. Duns Scotus was a Franciscan, as was Colette of Corbie, with her mystical ring and cross. And it is said that perhaps the most influential part of his theology was his defense of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, herself. So, this is another item in the VMs that has a strong but subtle connection with the rising tide of Mariology that was happening throughout the early 1400s.