[...] Google Translation is normally good enough to get me 50% [...]

Sounds similar to me reading dutch. I understand 50%, but I do not understand 100% after reading the text twice…

I liked your “biological paradox” idea very much (qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy, indeed!), and it seems to have inspired plenty of commentary here, which is good – all food for thought.

I think I should post soon about how transcription and modelling strategies affect the statistics so massively, it’s a big topic that nobody seems to cover properly…

Though my grasp of Geman is patchy (for my sins in a past life, I chose to learn Ancient Greek instead at school), Google Translation is normally good enough to get me 50% of the way there (though I do have to work to get the other 50%). But surely you have much better things to do than pore over your server logs to see when I’m dropping by?

Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….

In every transcription system is a whole set of assumptions about the nature of the writing system, and when I do some analysis in the transcriptions, I try to use the transcription alphabet of which I think it fits best in the matter of my analysis. For things like word-length distributions I feel (yes, it isn’t scientific) EVA as inappropriate and transform the transcription mechanically to Currier instead, which gives a much better match between ASCII characters and the things in the script I believe (it isn’t scientific again) to be a “letter”.

I am a little familar with the great Voynich 101 transcription and its underlying assumptions. Some of them are worth to be considered, especially the diffrent florishes in the EVA “sh”-glyph, and some other seems (insert my default bracketed phrase here) a little bit too finetuned to me.

But to see the thing I called the “biological paradox”, one don’t need any transcription at all, only a hires or midres image from the Beinecke website. It is obvious, even to someone who see the page for the first time. (Even a friend of mine which know nothing about the VMs is able to see it.) There are lots of similar formed “words” on the pages in the biological section, much more than in any other section of the Ms. The degree of similarity may differ with the transcription system used, but the fact will remain: The section of the VMs which contains the most disturbing and unique kind of illustrations seems to contain of the most redundant kind of “text”. This is really weird.

It is not the kind of “hard stuff” I wanted to post to the mailing list, but it had inspired me to do some (explicitly called as such) speculations about a “psychological feedback process” similar to parapsychological (this is a good word to remove the last similarity to things one can call scientific without becoming ridiculous) “automatic writing”, which I posted in my german blog. The speculative stuff is unripe and may not worth further research at the moment. But the “biological paradox”, as I named it, remains…

And — of course — please excuse my bad english. But I hope it is easier to understand than a google translation of my — sometimes rather “cryptic” — german.

if there are distinctions made in the transcription which were not intended then what you are analysing includes a “noise” which dilutes the signal, but such a random noise will flatten and weaken relationships and not produce artificial ones of any strength. So strong relationships that you do find and study can not be complete “mirages” produced by an inaccurate transcription.

Distinctions that were intended but missed by the transcription are more tricky perhaps, but mostly just means that you are looking at the thing through a fuzzy lens and missing some of the detail as a result….but what you can learn from the detail that you can resolve is not meaningless and is still very useful. And most uncompressed information is surprisingly error tolerant.

So we should be careful in stating the problems of transcription to not pull the Rugg from under the feet of people who are willing to put effort into analysis, which is pretty hard work for the most part but generally very worth it and almost certainly the only thing that will lead to a decryption (although perhaps not on its own).

Marke

Glen is particularly passionate in his defence of Leonell Strong’s claimed decryption against any perceived criticism of it – and if sometimes he goes over the line, I don’t mind too much as long as he backs up his arguments (something notably absent from the mailing list).

Contrary to what a statistics professor might tell you, entropy, redundancy, and structure are all extraordinarily subjective terms because they rely on your having got the transcription and tokenization right in the first place. What is perhaps lacking most in the “language” debate is someone to step forward and map out precisely how B text differs from A text: this is because things like the presence of free-standing ‘l’ (a strong B feature, I’m pretty sure) alter all the stats – but is that ‘l’ really the same letter as the one in ‘al’ and ‘ol’?

The model underlying your stats probably presumes that they are all the same letter, but I’m sure you can see how much would be altered if that presumption (and the 20-30 similar ones relating to tokenization) were wrong.

Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….

It’s the sort of “uncivilized” (and pointless) behaviour that unchecked hastened the demise of the Voynich Mailing List and I hope you can protect your blog from similar pollution.

But leaving that aside; my take on this is:

Several results of my analysis into the distribution and density of variation lead me to believe that the degree of contraction and abbreviation present in the underlying plaintext of VMS-A and B is not significantly different.

If a much higher degree of contraction and abbreviation were used in B versus A then you would expect to see less redundancy and a denser, more compact distribution of variation.

I do agree with you that the ‘A’ pages came first BTW.

Marke

As far as contraction & abbreviation goes: I suspect that people who don’t subscribe to Strong’s decryption would do well to read Mark Perakh’s paper – whether words are longer or shorter than English or Latin all comes down to what the correct level of transcription / tokenization should be, and we have substantially different views on that… but that’s OK. As for “dam”, my guess is that it is formed from two tokens (d + am) and that it codes for “&x”, i.e. ‘etc’. As for ’8′ [d] and ’9′ [y], they are probably not verbose: but I never said every letter had to be, did I? And the Society of Jesus formed in 1534, so your travelling Jesuits and their split stiles might well need to have been time-travelling Jesuits too, depending on when the VMs was written.

However, trading monkey faeces is all a bit pointless: unless you have swallowed a month’s worth of be-really-dogmatic pills in one hit, it ought to be pretty clear that there exists very large arguments against all types of thinking, VMs-wise – we’re none of us immune to criticism. The question is how to move forward – what that “fact sheet” would look like.

No problem here, except that the actual quote is “sutli ductle roulls the graoth coemli”. As odd as that may seem, it is derived mathematically, not through any linguistic means, and has a linguistic basis. A mathematical approach to the text is the only appropriate means of attack.

It’s easy to speak of contracted or abbreviated text, but that doesn’t match up with other observations. Word length statistics in Voynich-101 are in line with a language that falls between Latin and English, so abbreviation of say, one glyph per word would expand these statistics beyond known European languages. The EVA alphabet already does this expansion, depending on how carefully you choose to view the related glyphs, and EVA transcriptions have no match to any language, surviving or otherwise. The herbal-A texts have a well-established base of 17 primary glyphs, this is slightly expanded in the B texts. The additional part of what we would consider a correct linguistic distribution are absorbed by the overuse of glyphs such as “o” in both the A and B texts. Linguistically speaking, in the A texts, three specific floating glyphs take up the missing portion of what would otherwise be considered a normal alphabet distribution. In the B texts this is expanded to include the “c”, which can be considered to be floating “vowels”, their definition most usually falling within the vowel range. Consider the most common “word” in both cases, the word “8am”, how can this be verbose? How can the multiple instances of “8″, “9″, and other glyphs as stand-alones be considered verbose? There exists a very large argument against this type of thinking.

Yes, I could pick your whole argument apart, but that wouldn’t do any good because you reach conclusions that have no basis in fact. The bottom line here is that you know nothing about the cipher construction, and because you don’t, you are willing to hypothesize based only on the erroneous hypotheses of others. Yes, you’ve once again been busted by the hypothesis police.

Now let’s look at reality. The differences in script translate to a line length that differs between 37 glyphs to 50 glyphs, it’s actually an average difference of 9 glyphs between the most compact and the most verbose of scripts. The longer script examples make use of narrower margins, and the average height and width of the individual glyph varies only slightly, so the perception that some pages are more compact than others is partially illusion. It could be something as simple as the author only having so much to say in a space, so he fills that space a bit larger than the other, extending the margins, nothing more – just an hypothesis.

The “eagle feather” gives me a laugh. The travelling Jesuits were known for producing and selling small pocket bibles made of fake uterine vellum, and these were written using stiles, not quills. Such small print using a split stile, print much smaller than that used in the VMS. There are examples of these Jesuit bibles out there in the ether, very good examples actually. The question the “eagle feather” assertion brings up is one of available technology, and the Jesuit bible example demonstrates that the technology to write minutely was available though not used in the VMS, since the average height of VMS text approximates our modern 12 point type. Do you see why the “Hypothesis Police” exist? I haven’t even addressed your cipher hypothesis presented here, I’ve spent all my time addressing the underlying or “hidden” hypotheses that apparently direct you toward the fallacious conclusions you’ve reached. My usual take would be to ignore this post as that of an uninformed crackpot that doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. To me an hypothesis must have some basis in supportable fact, not just hearsay from some other researcher who may be misinformed.

So this pisses you off? Well that’s a good start. Tell me what makes you angry, and I’ll tell you why I think that way, in living color if need be. Let’s throw all that other shit out the window and get to the facts, that’s where it’s all going to happen anyway. That post you just made could have included a good deal of usable information that said something others could use as guidance. At one point or another we both need to be working off the same fact sheet, and we’re clearly not yet there.