From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Aug  1 07:37:49 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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Subject: Re: Cryptography of 1502 with Voynich resonances
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References: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene Zandbergen)        "Re: Cryptography of 1502 with Voynich resonances" (Jul 29, 20:10)
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This has nothing to do with the vms, but with nomenclators.

On 29 Jul 2000, at 17:47, Jim Reeds wrote:
> (To the ancient Romans, a nomenclator was a servant who reminded
> one of the names of people one met!)

To the people of Uruguay, nomenclator is the collection of names 
of streets (!). There is a curious tradition of naming streets after 
(usually not so) prominent people (mostly politicians). There is 
even a piece of legislation stating that one has be be dead for 10 
years before a street can be named after you. 

So the Uruguayan nomenclators usually have lots of people's 
names who nobody knows who they were.
In Japan, the great majority of streets have no names, and in 
Englad, many streets have almost the same names and you're 
never shure which one you want: things like Queen's Street, 
Queen's Road, Queen's Close, Queen's Way (and also 
Queensway!),  Queen's Circus, Queen's Crescent, Queen's Row, 
Queen's Lane, Queen's Path  :-(

Gabriel

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Aug  2 15:39:25 2000
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From: Jim Gillogly <jim@acm.org>
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I'll be diving on Roatan for a couple of weeks starting on Saturday,
then at Crypto 2000 in Santa Barbara, so administrative requests
won't be handled before September.  If anybody writes to the whole
list asking to be added or deleted, everyone may feel free to write
them and tell them so.

Happy Voyniching...
-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	Mersday, 10 Wedmath S.R. 2000, 19:34
	12.19.7.7.14, 2 Ix 17 Xul, First Lord of Night

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug  3 04:49:19 2000
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Message-ID: <39893167.A2288311@voynich.nu>
Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2000 08:46:31 +0000
From: Rene Zandbergen <rene@voynich.nu>
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Subject: Voynich MS not(?) in Rudolf's Kunstkammer inventory...
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Dear all,

I finally had a chance to read the publication about the inventory of
Rudolf's Kunstkammer (museum), which I mentioned before. It is 
extremely interesting, and I will write about this at some length on
my web site in the near future, but a quick summary follows here.
The inventory, written by hand by one Daniel Froesch, successor to
Octavio Strada, is started on 1 May 1607, and then maintained up to
1611. These dates are important as 1607 is roughly the time that
Jacobus Horcicky arrived at Rudolf's court, and 1611 is when Rudolf
abdicated.
The publication has a lengthy, very interesting, introduction about
Rudolf's collection followed by a complete transcription of the 
(German) text of the inventory. There are some copies of pages
of the book, showing Froeschl's handwriting to be very different
from any annotations found in the VMs, except the page numbers,
which are very similar indeed (i.e. typical of the area/period).
I'll show some samples.

The items are numbered and the most interesting section (Rudolf's
books) cover nrs 2576 - 2814 (plus a few more in the middle).
I did not find any entry in the long list that is a clear description
of the VMs (compared with the clear description in the Baresch
letter), but at least one of them is tantalizing. In (17th C) German:

 2585.  In folio.  Ein _philosophisch_ alt geschriben buch mit
        figurn und ein copey uff pergamen geschriben vom Mathes
        Do"rrer, ungebunden, welchs nit gantz beysamen und herr
        Haiden auB bevelch I. Mt: etliche bletter davon genommen.

approximately:

   an old philosophical (hand)written book with figures
   and a copy on parchment written by (or from) Mathes Doerrer,
   unbound, not completely together, and Mr. Haiden by order of
   his majesty several leaves taken from it.

I'm not sure about 'auss bevelch' either. Could this also mean
'from which'?
If this is not the VMs, then we have the problem that it must
either never have entered R's Kunstkammer, or he parted with
it before 1607 (the Pontanus connection?). However, from the
descriptions in the article it would seem very out of character
for R. to part with any item in his collection.
Finally, quite a few items in the inventory are marked as:
'with his majesty', indicating that R kept them near himself.
These are mostly 'magical' items.

So, if anyone with better German knowledge can clarify what,
above, is the meaning of 'copey', and what, precisely, were
the roles of Messrs Doerrer and Haiden above, we might know
more.
There are other very brief entries among the 250 which could
potentially mean the VMs, but, like I said, I will write about
this at more length a bit later. The book descriptions are
10 pages, typewritten, so I'll see if they can be reasonably
scanned.

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug  3 05:09:34 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: AW: Voynich MS not(?) in Rudolf's Kunstkammer inventory...
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 11:05:41 +0200 
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Hi,
some comments: on
....
[

>  2585.  In folio.  Ein _philosophisch_ alt geschriben buch mit
>         figurn und ein copey uff pergamen geschriben vom Mathes
>         Do"rrer, ungebunden, welchs nit gantz beysamen und herr
>         Haiden auB bevelch I. Mt: etliche bletter davon genommen.
> 
	[Anders, Claus]    Ein _philosophisch_ alt geschriben buch  
	[Anders, Claus]  should translated: a philosophical book in old
writing
	[Anders, Claus]  copey is Kopie->copy (from Kupfer = copper) ?
	auB bevelch = auf Befehl (on order) or au bewelch (aus welchem=
from this) 
	but order would make more sence.
	Cheers
	Clau [Anders, Claus]  s

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug  3 08:55:42 2000
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Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2000 14:51:38 +0200
From: "Rafal T. Prinke" <rafalp@amu.edu.pl>
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Subject: Re: Voynich MS not(?) in Rudolf's Kunstkammer inventory...
References: <39893167.A2288311@voynich.nu>
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Rene Zandbergen wrote:

This is extremely important for establishing whether Rudolf II
indeed owned VMS at any time or not.

> I did not find any entry in the long list that is a clear description
> of the VMs (compared with the clear description in the Baresch
> letter), but at least one of them is tantalizing. In (17th C) German:
> 
>  2585.  In folio.  Ein _philosophisch_ alt geschriben buch mit
>         figurn und ein copey uff pergamen geschriben vom Mathes
>         Do"rrer, ungebunden, welchs nit gantz beysamen und herr
>         Haiden auB bevelch I. Mt: etliche bletter davon genommen.

The fact that this item is "In folio" makes it rather unlikely
that it is VMS. The latter is 225 x 160 mm which can hardly
be classified as "folio". It would be "octavo" (typically 18-25 cm
high).

> There are other very brief entries among the 250 which could
> potentially mean the VMs, but, like I said, I will write about
> this at more length a bit later. The book descriptions are
> 10 pages, typewritten, so I'll see if they can be reasonably
> scanned.

That would be very useful and interesting. 

Best regards,

Rafal

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug  3 09:02:53 2000
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Subject: Re: Voynich MS not(?) in Rudolf's Kunstkammer inventory...
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    >  2585.  In folio.  Ein _philosophisch_ alt geschriben buch mit
    >  figurn und ein copey uff pergamen geschriben vom Mathes
    >  Do"rrer, ungebunden, welchs nit gantz beysamen und herr
    >  Haiden auB bevelch I. Mt: etliche bletter davon genommen.

I suppose that the phrase "in folio" means that the book was made
from whole sheets of vellum, folded only once (the binding fold).
Can we draw any conclusion from this note about the size of item 2585?
Is the VMs "in folio", "in quarto", or what?

All the best,

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug  3 10:12:31 2000
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Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2000 14:11:13 +0000
From: Rene Zandbergen <rene@voynich.nu>
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Dear all,

based on the suggestion by Claus Anders, from which I interpret
that there should be one print in the book, and on the book
size info from Rafal, I think it is safe to conclude that book
nr. 2585 is not the Voynich MS. 
The list of 250 do not seem to include any 'magical' books, and
nothing about alchemy/chemistry either, though it must be said
that usually the descriptions are more concerned with the appearance
than the contents:

826: one large folio Turkish book, in a red woollen sack, 
     black leater cover, guilded and silver locks.

Stay tuned for the more complete description. (I also did not
have time to photocopy all I wanted, so I will need to get 
the rest either in person or by mail.

Cheers, Rene

From adamsd@cts.com  Thu Aug  3 12:29:25 2000
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From: Adams Douglas <adamsd@cts.com>
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Subject: Re: Denis Mardle
To: reeds@research.att.com (Jim Reeds)
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In-Reply-To: <1000731220839.ZM939182@fry.research.att.com> from "Jim Reeds" at Jul 31, 2000 10:08:39 PM
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Jim Reeds wrote:
> 
> Sad news, gang:
> 
> I just learned today that Denis Mardle, the elderly British
> member of the VMS list, has died.  Mardle was the host of the
> June 1998 "Second British" VMS meeting, where I met (among others)
> him and Gabriel Landini for the first time.  

Indeed sad, Jim. While I never met Denis I had some private email
correspondance with him as well as exchanges on the list and found him as
fascinating and full of information and enthusiasm as I'm sure he was even
more of in person.

I regret now I didn't take the time to look him up when I was in
England last year.

Perhaps the best way to remember him and his contributions is to solve this
thing, so his name can be known as part of the team that did it.

-Adams
-- 
====================================================
Adams Douglas, San Diego, CA   Adams@Douglas.net
http://Adams.Douglas.net/
PGP Public Keys: http://Adams.Douglas.net/pgpkey.txt
<adamsd@crash.cts.com> 084E B706 E8D5 4C2E 1A43  ECE2 6B96 8018 6238 197A
UTM:11S0487200 3623500 MGRS-2:11SMS872235 (100-meter)

        "Don't touch that, please. Your primitive intellect wouldn't
         understand things with alloys and compositions and things
         with...molecular structures."
                - Ash (Bruce Campbell), _Army_of_Darkness_
                  screenplay by Sam & Ivan Raimi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug  3 14:48:17 2000
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Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2000 20:45:42 +0200
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Subject: Re: Voynich MS not(?) in Rudolf's Kunstkammer inventory...
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Jorge Stolfi wrote:

>     >  2585.  In folio.  Ein _philosophisch_ alt geschriben buch mit

> I suppose that the phrase "in folio" means that the book was made
> from whole sheets of vellum, folded only once (the binding fold).
> Can we draw any conclusion from this note about the size of item 2585?
> Is the VMs "in folio", "in quarto", or what?

These terms have double meanings: (1) the number of
folding the original sheet of paper (or parchment) and thus 
the number of sheets in a quire; (2) the size of the book (codex)
which is roughly related to the number of foldings, even though
the sizes of original sheets from different paper mills differed 
considerably.

As Rene mentioned that another book in the inventory is classified
as "large folio" we may be sure that the author had the size 
rather than number of foldings in mind, as otherwise the "large"
modifier would not make sense.

But even if it were so, the VMS has quires of 8 sheets so 
it is "in octavo" also in this sense.

Best regards,

Rafal

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug  3 18:13:30 2000
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From: "John Grove" <4groves@sprint.ca>
To: <voynich@rand.org>
References: <39893167.A2288311@voynich.nu> <200008031257.JAA04671@coruja.dcc.unicamp.br> <3989BDD6.4CCFFA63@amu.edu.pl>
Subject: Re: Voynich MS not(?) in Rudolf's Kunstkammer inventory...
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 18:17:06 -0400
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    Rafal,
         In your earlier post, are you saying that the size of the vellum
sheet would decide whether a manuscript was quired 'in folio, in octavo'
etc? Do we know that the VMS was in Octavo when Rudolf would/could have
possessed it, or was it bound/re-bound since then? We've discussed the
possibility of page-order being incorrect before, thus suggesting the VMS
was either bound or rebound by someone that didn't know what pages went
where, except for the obvious zodiac folios.

    John.

----- Original Message -----
From: Rafal T. Prinke <rafalp@amu.edu.pl>
To: <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
Cc: <voynich@rand.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2000 2:45 PM
Subject: Re: Voynich MS not(?) in Rudolf's Kunstkammer inventory...


>
>
> Jorge Stolfi wrote:
>
> >     >  2585.  In folio.  Ein _philosophisch_ alt geschriben buch mit
>
> > I suppose that the phrase "in folio" means that the book was made
> > from whole sheets of vellum, folded only once (the binding fold).
> > Can we draw any conclusion from this note about the size of item 2585?
> > Is the VMs "in folio", "in quarto", or what?
>
> These terms have double meanings: (1) the number of
> folding the original sheet of paper (or parchment) and thus
> the number of sheets in a quire; (2) the size of the book (codex)
> which is roughly related to the number of foldings, even though
> the sizes of original sheets from different paper mills differed
> considerably.
>
> As Rene mentioned that another book in the inventory is classified
> as "large folio" we may be sure that the author had the size
> rather than number of foldings in mind, as otherwise the "large"
> modifier would not make sense.
>
> But even if it were so, the VMS has quires of 8 sheets so
> it is "in octavo" also in this sense.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Rafal
>

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug  4 00:28:01 2000
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A new subscriber to the list let me know that there's an
article in today's USA Today about the Voynich Ms.  See:

http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20000803/2516105s.htm

Rene Zandbergen and Gabriel Landini are quoted at some length.
Other than citing the manuscript's age as 361 years, it appears
to be remarkably low on bogons.
-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	Sterday, 12 Wedmath S.R. 2000, 04:21
	12.19.7.7.16, 4 Cib 19 Xul, Third Lord of Night

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug  4 03:30:46 2000
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Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2000 07:29:32 +0000
From: Rene Zandbergen <rene@voynich.nu>
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Dear all,

Jim wrote:

> A new subscriber to the list let me know that there's an
> article in today's USA Today about the Voynich Ms.  See:

Actually, the 'main' location of the article is in the author's
(equally hard-to-find) column at:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/net022.htm

This has links and some pictures.
(And it lets you go to his past articles, of which I can recommend
the one about crank.net).

> Rene Zandbergen and Gabriel Landini are quoted at some length.
> Other than citing the manuscript's age as 361 years, it appears
> to be remarkably low on bogons.

Well, I regret the overly amount of attention on myself, but
specifically asked him to change one thing: the Voynich font
was designed exclusively by Gabriel. We'll see if he complies.
It should be easy but he'd have to tell his chief editor (or
whatever) that he made a mistake.

And then, of course, he got my nationality wrong and my age right :-)

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug  4 14:38:21 2000
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Message-ID: <398B0ECC.B3B0B1F4@voynich.nu>
Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2000 20:43:24 +0200
From: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene Zandbergen)
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Subject: USA Today article, bits and pieces...
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Dear all,

the USA Today article mentions a musical composition by one
Hanspeter Kyburz, which Jacques already unearthed a couple of
years ago. I don't know if anyone has actually heard the piece
(I haven't).
A description of the reasoning behind it (in German) is
found at:

http://www.mhsg.ac.at/mp_97/programm/sa1.htm#kyburz

Also, the French musician mentioned in USA Today was actually
English, but he is part of a French group called
"Ensemble Intercontemporain", who performed the French premiere
of this piece on 23 May this year. This is announced at the 
following web site, which contains a curious coincidence
(10 points for spotting it):

http://www.ircam.fr/departements/creation/saison99/00_05_23.html 

Finally, I got another message from the author of the article
saying that he was approached by one of his readers with the
following suggestion:

   The reader believes Nathaniel Hawthorne saw the book in
   Rome in 1858 and later used it in his story Septimius
   Felton. He further claims "You can look in Hawthorne's Rome
   notes and see that he sees the Voynich or a book much like
   it." 

Well, I'm an absolute ignoramus when it comes to literature, 
but someone one the list may well have read this book and
may wish to comment on it.

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug  4 17:56:30 2000
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From: Claus_Anders@t-online.de (Claus Anders)
To: <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
Cc: <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Re: Voynich MS not(?) in Rudolf's Kunstkammer inventory...
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 23:22:23 +0200
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Jorge Stolfi wrote:

>     >  2585.  In folio.  Ein _philosophisch_ alt geschriben buch mit

> I suppose that the phrase "in folio" means that the book was made
> from whole sheets of vellum, folded only once (the binding fold).
> Can we draw any conclusion from this note about the size of item 2585?
> Is the VMs "in folio", "in quarto", or what?
Today I looked up the term "in folio" in an ethym. Dictionairy and found it
had 2 meanings before 17th Century:
- in single sheets 
- in sheets folded once
Later it had the meaning of a big sheet folded into the size of a Foliant
hence the phrase in folio b ecame a size (roughly the modern DIN A4). Books
of this size where called foliants (after 17th century).

BTW.: had someone compared the german "Suetterlin" script with Voynich
script?
Cheers
Claus Anders


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From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug  4 18:07:26 2000
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From: Thom Ryng <thomr@geoagents.com>
To: "'Claus_Anders@t-online.de'" <Claus_Anders@t-online.de>,
        stolfi@ic.unicamp.br
Cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: RE: Voynich MS not(?) in Rudolf's Kunstkammer inventory...
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You can find a (short) example of Sutterlin at
http://www.wisc.edu/mki/sutterl.html. It doesn't look much like Voynich
script (to me at any rate).

ciao,

thom ryng


>  BTW.: had someone compared the german "Suetterlin" script with Voynich
> script?
> Cheers
> Claus Anders
> 

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug  4 23:51:52 2000
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From: "Shadow" <Shadow13@iname.com>
To: <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: New
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 23:50:57 -0400
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Hiya...

I saw a short bit on the voynich ms last night on the discovery channel, and
my first thoughts were that it sounded much like a witches "book of
shadows"... It took quite a while to find stuff on the web last night (could
not figure out how to spell voynich), however, after reading all that i have
found so far, i am wondering how/where i can get copies of the script (would
color be outrageously pricey??) i would like to examine this in much greater
detail....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~     ShadowLights
~~     Automated Lighting & Laser Design
~~     Email: Shadow13@iname.com
~~     Website: http:\\members.tripod.com/~ShadowLights/index.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug  5 00:02:31 2000
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Date: Sat, 05 Aug 2000 04:01:18 +0000
From: Jim Gillogly <jim@acm.org>
Organization: Banzai Institute
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Shadow wrote:
> ... how/where i can get copies of the script (would

Welcome to all the new members of the list from the USA Today article.
I suggest visiting the web sites of some of the old hands to answer
these questions.  The list doesn't have a FAQ per se, but many of
the sites of list members include all the introductory info you might
need.  See, for example, Jim Reeds' page:

http://www.research.att.com/~reeds/voynich.html

The short form answer to your question is that a low-res black
and white xerox-style copy is available from the Beinecke at a
reasonable price, several pictures are available here and there
on the web (some in color), and list members and others have
transcribed the manuscript using various formalisms.

-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	13 Wedmath S.R. 2000, 03:57
	12.19.7.7.17, 5 Caban 20 Xul, Fourth Lord of Night

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug  5 01:14:18 2000
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Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 22:21:27 -0700
To: voynich@rand.org
From: jporter@ricochet.net (Julie Porter)
Subject: Re: VMs: USA Today article
Sender: jim@mail.rand.org
Status: ORS

>Dear all,
>
>Jim wrote:
>
>> A new subscriber to the list let me know that there's an
>> article in today's USA Today about the Voynich Ms.  See:
>
>Actually, the 'main' location of the article is in the author's
>(equally hard-to-find) column at:
>
>http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/net022.htm
>
>This has links and some pictures.
>(And it lets you go to his past articles, of which I can recommend
>the one about crank.net).
>
>> Rene Zandbergen and Gabriel Landini are quoted at some length.
>> Other than citing the manuscript's age as 361 years, it appears
>> to be remarkably low on bogons.
>
>Well, I regret the overly amount of attention on myself, but
>specifically asked him to change one thing: the Voynich font
>was designed exclusively by Gabriel.
I seem to recall making a Postscript Type 1 Version myself from an existing
font. It was a collabritive effort. Some of it goes back to Bennett. I am
pretty sure I introed the * splat for unreadable glyphs. I do reallize this
was a few years back. Still one likes to have credit for work done no
matter how small.
-jP

 We'll see if he complies.
>It should be easy but he'd have to tell his chief editor (or
>whatever) that he made a mistake.
>
>And then, of course, he got my nationality wrong and my age right :-)
>
>Cheers, Rene


From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug  5 01:14:18 2000
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Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 22:21:27 -0700
To: voynich@rand.org
From: jporter@ricochet.net (Julie Porter)
Subject: Re: VMs: USA Today article
Sender: jim@mail.rand.org
Status: OR

>Dear all,
>
>Jim wrote:
>
>> A new subscriber to the list let me know that there's an
>> article in today's USA Today about the Voynich Ms.  See:
>
>Actually, the 'main' location of the article is in the author's
>(equally hard-to-find) column at:
>
>http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/net022.htm
>
>This has links and some pictures.
>(And it lets you go to his past articles, of which I can recommend
>the one about crank.net).
>
>> Rene Zandbergen and Gabriel Landini are quoted at some length.
>> Other than citing the manuscript's age as 361 years, it appears
>> to be remarkably low on bogons.
>
>Well, I regret the overly amount of attention on myself, but
>specifically asked him to change one thing: the Voynich font
>was designed exclusively by Gabriel.
I seem to recall making a Postscript Type 1 Version myself from an existing
font. It was a collabritive effort. Some of it goes back to Bennett. I am
pretty sure I introed the * splat for unreadable glyphs. I do reallize this
was a few years back. Still one likes to have credit for work done no
matter how small.
-jP

 We'll see if he complies.
>It should be easy but he'd have to tell his chief editor (or
>whatever) that he made a mistake.
>
>And then, of course, he got my nationality wrong and my age right :-)
>
>Cheers, Rene


From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug  5 11:09:54 2000
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Message-ID: <398C2F3B.44F7D727@voynich.nu>
Date: Sat, 05 Aug 2000 17:14:03 +0200
From: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene Zandbergen)
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Julie wrote:

> I seem to recall making a Postscript Type 1 Version myself from an existing
> font. It was a collabritive effort. Some of it goes back to Bennett. I am
> pretty sure I introed the * splat for unreadable glyphs. I do reallize this
> was a few years back. Still one likes to have credit for work done no
> matter how small.

It is correct that Gabriel included your 'splat' in his font
(he told me).

Reme

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug  5 12:57:53 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Organization: The University of Birmingham, U.K.
To: voynich@rand.org
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Subject: Re: VMs: USA Today article
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 Julie wrote:
> I seem to recall making a Postscript Type 1 Version myself from an existing
> font. It was a collabritive effort. Some of it goes back to Bennett. I am
> pretty sure I introed the * splat for unreadable glyphs. I do reallize this
> was a few years back. Still one likes to have credit for work done no
> matter how small.

I took the idea of the 'splat' (which I thought was very cool), but the 
all the font characters in the EVA.TTF were made from scratch.
I will add a credit to Julie for "the original idea of using a 'splat' 
instead of the '*' " in the documentation of the font.
Would that be Ok?

Cheers,
Gabriel



From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Aug  6 00:25:01 2000
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Date: Sat, 05 Aug 2000 23:22:34 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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To: Shadow <Shadow13@iname.com>
Cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: New
References: <LPBBLNMLMJAFACPCFEIEAECECCAA.Shadow13@iname.com>
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	Welcome!  There are about 17 color pages from the VMs
on the Web, and around 55 B&W images on the Web.  Visit
my VMs page:

http://www2.micro-net.com/~ixohoxi/voy/voynich.htm

for links to all of these.  

	The Mini-FAQ on my page will give you at least some
orientation, then you can, if you wish, visit the
Primary  Websites noted there.

	Just to show I'm not too egotistical, another good
intro is:

http://www.voynich.nu/aes.html 

by Gabriel Landini and Ren Zandbergen, who deservedly
getting the current media attention.

Dennis


Shadow wrote:
> 
> Hiya...
> 
> I saw a short bit on the voynich ms last night on the discovery channel, and
> my first thoughts were that it sounded much like a witches "book of
> shadows"... It took quite a while to find stuff on the web last night (could
> not figure out how to spell voynich), however, after reading all that i have
> found so far, i am wondering how/where i can get copies of the script (would
> color be outrageously pricey??) i would like to examine this in much greater
> detail....

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Aug  6 21:41:13 2000
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Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 18:47:14 -0700
To: voynich@rand.org
From: jporter@ricochet.net (Julie Porter)
Subject: Re: VMs: USA Today article
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>Julie,
>I added an acknoledgment to your splat original idea in:
>
>http://web.bham.ac.uk/G.Landini/evmt/eva.htm
>
>and also in the documentation of the font.
>Please let me know if that is Ok.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Gabriel
Thank you very much. I appriciate the credit, even if it is a little one.
-julieP


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Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 18:47:14 -0700
To: voynich@rand.org
From: jporter@ricochet.net (Julie Porter)
Subject: Re: VMs: USA Today article
Sender: jim@mail.rand.org
Status: OR

>Julie,
>I added an acknoledgment to your splat original idea in:
>
>http://web.bham.ac.uk/G.Landini/evmt/eva.htm
>
>and also in the documentation of the font.
>Please let me know if that is Ok.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Gabriel
Thank you very much. I appriciate the credit, even if it is a little one.
-julieP


From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Aug  7 07:07:49 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'Thom Ryng'" <thomr@geoagents.com>
Cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: AW: Voynich MS not(?) in Rudolf's Kunstkammer inventory...
Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 10:12:26 +0200 
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Status: OR

I found another  link with lots of fonts:
http://user.dtcc.edu/~berlin/fonts.html

Claus
> -----Ursprngliche Nachricht-----
> Von:	Thom Ryng [SMTP:thomr@geoagents.com]
> Gesendet am:	Samstag, 5. August 2000 00:08
> An:	'Claus_Anders@t-online.de'; stolfi@ic.unicamp.br
> Cc:	voynich@rand.org
> Betreff:	RE: Voynich MS not(?) in Rudolf's Kunstkammer inventory...
> 
> 
> You can find a (short) example of Sutterlin at
> http://www.wisc.edu/mki/sutterl.html. It doesn't look much like Voynich
> script (to me at any rate).
> 
> ciao,
> 
> thom ryng
> 
> 
> >  BTW.: had someone compared the german "Suetterlin" script with Voynich
> > script?
> > Cheers
> > Claus Anders
> > 

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Aug  7 10:08:54 2000
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Message-ID: <398EC28C.9D63EFDD@voynich.nu>
Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2000 14:07:08 +0000
From: Rene Zandbergen <rene@voynich.nu>
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Dear all,

I put links to some pictures of the inventory of Rudolf's museum
and copies of the transcription (about 12 gifs of 50 kB each)
at http://www.voynich.nu/inventory.html
for those who might enjoy browsing through them.
There are some English bits near the bottom of the page but most
is in German.

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Aug  7 10:10:00 2000
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From: Grant Covell <GCovell@c-bridge.com>
To: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: RE: USA Today article, bits and pieces...
Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 10:08:19 -0400 
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Subject: RE: USA Today article, bits and pieces...


Hello friends--

This piece actually rekindled my interest in the manuscript: I can provide a
citation for a recording next week after I check the CD at home.

In my opinion, the musical work doesn't do the manuscript and the quest for
it's decipherment much justice: I'll need to reaudition it before I get more
into details!

Grant.

-----Original Message-----
From: Zandbergen@t-online.de [mailto:Zandbergen@t-online.de]
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 2:43 PM
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: USA Today article, bits and pieces...


Dear all,

the USA Today article mentions a musical composition by one
Hanspeter Kyburz, which Jacques already unearthed a couple of
years ago. I don't know if anyone has actually heard the piece
(I haven't).
A description of the reasoning behind it (in German) is
found at:

http://www.mhsg.ac.at/mp_97/programm/sa1.htm#kyburz

Also, the French musician mentioned in USA Today was actually
English, but he is part of a French group called
"Ensemble Intercontemporain", who performed the French premiere
of this piece on 23 May this year. This is announced at the 
following web site, which contains a curious coincidence
(10 points for spotting it):

http://www.ircam.fr/departements/creation/saison99/00_05_23.html 

Finally, I got another message from the author of the article
saying that he was approached by one of his readers with the
following suggestion:

   The reader believes Nathaniel Hawthorne saw the book in
   Rome in 1858 and later used it in his story Septimius
   Felton. He further claims "You can look in Hawthorne's Rome
   notes and see that he sees the Voynich or a book much like
   it." 

Well, I'm an absolute ignoramus when it comes to literature, 
but someone one the list may well have read this book and
may wish to comment on it.

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Aug  8 15:13:20 2000
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From: Adams Douglas <adamsd@cts.com>
Message-Id: <200008081910.MAA23831@cts.com>
Subject: Friedman gets his patent
To: voynich@rand.org (Voynich Manuscript List)
Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 12:10:18 -0700 (PDT)
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Just a little news item on a name familiar to everyone in Team Voynich:

The US Patent Office has granted patent #6097812 to William Friedman for
his "Cryptographic System" (an Enigma-like machine). Friedman filed for
this patent in 1933!

See the patent here:
http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?&pn=US06097812__&s_all=1

-Adams

-- 
====================================================
Adams Douglas, San Diego, CA   Adams@Douglas.net
http://Adams.Douglas.net/
PGP Public Keys: http://Adams.Douglas.net/pgpkey.txt
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UTM:11S0487200 3623500 MGRS-2:11SMS872235 (100-meter)

        "Don't touch that, please. Your primitive intellect wouldn't
         understand things with alloys and compositions and things
         with...molecular structures."
                - Ash (Bruce Campbell), _Army_of_Darkness_
                  screenplay by Sam & Ivan Raimi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug 18 04:11:09 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Organization: The University of Birmingham, UK.
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 09:09:16 +0100
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Subject: VMS in Dr. Dobbs Journal
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A short article on the Vms is at:

http://www.ddj.com/news/fullstory.cgi?id=2127

Jacques,  you haven't really "given up", have you? :-)

Gabriel

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug 18 20:05:15 2000
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Subject: Zipf's Law/Benford's Law
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 17:02:54 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: andras@kornai.com
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Dear Voynichers,

this was a while ago and I seem to have misplaced the relevant message, could
the person who sent me the info the first place please repeat it, or could
someone step into the breach?  Generally, people talk about Zipf's Law in
cases of word frequencies, sizes of cities, etc. which distribute over an
infinite domain. Where the range of choices is finite (and usually pretty
small, like in the case of letter or digit frequencies) there is Benford's Law
and a bunch of other possibilities.  However, _somebody_ _sometime_ somewhere
(and I think it was the Voynich list!) suggested _something_ that was (a) a
finite probability distribution and (b) one that was called "Zipf's Law" at
least by some people. Any help greatly appreciated, thanks,

Andras Kornai


  

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug 19 07:37:17 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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Subject: Re: Zipf's Law/Benford's Law
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On 18 Aug 2000, at 17:02, andras@kornai.com wrote:

> However, _somebody_ _sometime_ somewhere (and I think it was the
> Voynich list!) suggested _something_ that was (a) a finite
> probability distribution and (b) one that was called "Zipf's Law"
> at least by some people. Any help greatly appreciated, thanks, 

Andras,
It was not me and perhaps this is not related at all:
I remember that in one of Wentian Li's papers (or a paper in his 
site) there was a mention to Yule's distribution rather than Zipf's. I 
think that this was in the context of DNA correlations.

I hope this helps.

Gabriel



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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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Google returns this (perhaps pertinent) page:

http://www.cut-the-knot.com/do_you_know/zipfLaw.html

Cheers,

Gabriel

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug 19 19:00:09 2000
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Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 17:56:57 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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	Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I
present...

Deciphering James Hampton's Secret Writing
http://www2.micro-net.com/~ixohoxi/hampton/hampton.htm

	James Hampton represents the situation most analogous
to the VMs that I've found.  Hampton was a black
American "outsider artist".  He built the magnificent
Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium
General Assembly now on display at the Smithsonian.  He
also kept a journal in an unprecedented and
undeciphered script.  

	Here are the entropy analyses of Hamptonese:

                         Sample
                    #     size
                    ch.  (char)  h0        h1      
h2        h2-h1

Hamptonese          32    1080   5.000     4.060   
2.881     1.179
Chamorro            25    3052   4.644     4.024   
3.325     0.699
Hawaiian            18   10433   4.170     3.622   
2.935     0.687
English             26   32000   4.700     4.169   
3.549     0.620
Voynich a Herbal    20   10152   4.322     3.787   
2.210     1.577

	h1-h2 is definitely not like natural language, but not
as out of line as in the VMs.

	Any and all comments welcome.  Enjoy!

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Aug 21 16:25:34 2000
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Message-ID: <39A18F49.6D314AA6@voynich.nu>
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 20:21:29 +0000
From: Rene Zandbergen <rene@voynich.nu>
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Dear all,

anyone who's got some time on his (or her) hands might want to
read this piece of fiction:
http://www.screal.com/deluge/

It's got all the usual stuff: 

- boy meets girl
- girl is more interested in the Voynich MS
- boy travels to Tibet and finds...

  a Yeti...

  and something else.

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Aug 22 16:06:27 2000
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Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 15:58:45 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jason Morningstar <mornj@ils.unc.edu>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich research needs
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Hello, 
  
This is my first post to the list but I've been following the conversation
for some time now.  I'm a grad student in information science, and would
love to focus my energies on a Voynich-related project.  My question to
the list, then:  What are some useful avenues of inquiry?  I've read the 
suggestions of Mary D'Imperio, in her monograph, and Jim Reeds, on his
web site.  My coursework has exposed me to information retrieval, and I
read with interest Gabriel Landini's application of Zipf's laws to the
VMS.   

I hope this post sparks a general discussion of "work to be done", and I
would particularly value any opinion or advice on areas that would both
advance our understanding of the VMS and fall within the scope of a
semester- or year-long graduate project.  

Thanks and best regards, 

Jason

----------
Jason Morningstar
School of Information and Library Science
UNC Chapel Hill


From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Aug 22 17:00:42 2000
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From: Adams Douglas <adamsd@cts.com>
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Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
To: mornj@ils.unc.edu (Jason Morningstar)
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 13:56:32 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0008221538430.1036-100000@ruby.ils.unc.edu> from "Jason Morningstar" at Aug 22, 2000 03:58:45 PM
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Jason Morningstar wrote:
> 
> I hope this post sparks a general discussion of "work to be done", and I
> would particularly value any opinion or advice on areas that would both
> advance our understanding of the VMS and fall within the scope of a
> semester- or year-long graduate project.  

I actually think the most important work to be done is some kind of
forensic analysis of the VMs itself--especially non-invasive and
non-destructive analysis such as examination under different frequencies of
light.

As far as work to be done without actually going to Yale, there's so many
things that can be done with the transcriptions we now have that were not
available to previous researchers. Some of the other list members probably
have more specific ideas on those lines.

It's best to first approach the manuscript in areas you feel most
comfortable and confident in your abilities. I started by looking at the
astronomical pages and seeing what could be gleaned from an
archaeoastronomical perspective, since that's an ongoing interest of mine.
I'm now getting more into the statistical properties of the text as I learn
more about this aspect from other's work.

But welcome from lurker-land, and feel free to discuss your ideas.

-Adams

-- 
====================================================
Adams Douglas, San Diego, CA   Adams@Douglas.net
http://Adams.Douglas.net/
PGP Public Keys: http://Adams.Douglas.net/pgpkey.txt
<adamsd@crash.cts.com> 084E B706 E8D5 4C2E 1A43  ECE2 6B96 8018 6238 197A
UTM:11S0487200 3623500 MGRS-2:11SMS872235 (100-meter)

     "I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking 
      about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; 
      but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in 
      numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind."
                              - William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Aug 22 17:52:16 2000
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From: sjm <sethm@loomcom.com>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
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On Tue, Aug 22, 2000 at 03:58:45PM -0400, Jason Morningstar wrote:
[...]
> I hope this post sparks a general discussion of "work to be done", and I
> would particularly value any opinion or advice on areas that would both
> advance our understanding of the VMS and fall within the scope of a
> semester- or year-long graduate project.  
> 

I personally feel that the single most useful research tool we could have
is a very high quality color photographic reproduction of the manuscript.
We have discussed this matter to death in the past, even rather heatedly,
but it never hurts to revisit it in summary.

Second to that is a good quality combined interlinear text version of
the existing transcriptions.  Much of this work has already been done,
thanks to the dedicated efforts of several list members.

Unfortunately, the group still seems to be banging its collective
head against the wall.  I may be echoing Jacques Guy's complaints,
but it seems that we have got nowhere, though certainly not for lack of
dedication or hard work.  It seems logical that one of three possible
conditions is true:  Either that we're all missing something very
important which is right in front of our noses, or that we lack some
vital piece of the puzzle without which we are lost, or that there is
no answer to be had and the manuscript is a hoax.  I'm increasingly of
the opinion that the last is true, but I'm certainly not convinced.

At any rate, fresh eyes looking at the problem can never hurt.
Welcome to the discussion, and good luck!

> Thanks and best regards, 
> 
> Jason

-Seth Morabito

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Aug 23 05:36:38 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Faint script on Folio 11r
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 11:34:25 +0200
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Dear all,
today I had a closer look at f11r (from Beinecke Images) and found - after
playing with contrast and brighting some readable script not mentioned in
the transcription.
It can be found on the left middle part of the folio and you have to mirror
it.
Maybe it's from the other side (shining through), but for me the script
seems to be Latin (I could read  somethinng like "ars" ). Because of the jpg
compression it's quit impossible to enlarge/enhance this part properly. So
maybe someone with a good copy have have a closer look (or it has already be
done).
Comments!!
Greetings from Aachen
Claus Anders 
===================================
Claus Anders

debis Systemhaus GEI
Pascalstr. 8
52076 Aachen, Germany

phone:(+49) 2408/943-781          Fax: -430  
mailto:CAnders@debis.com
===================================



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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
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Subject: f11r
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Dear all,
after looking at the interlinear transc., the nearly unreadable text seem to
come from f11v.
Sorry

===================================
Claus Anders

debis Systemhaus GEI
Pascalstr. 8
52076 Aachen, Germany

phone:(+49) 2408/943-781          Fax: -430  
mailto:CAnders@debis.com
===================================



From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Aug 23 13:34:45 2000
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From: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene Zandbergen)
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Jason Morningstar wrote:

> I would particularly value any opinion or advice on areas that
> would both advance our understanding of the VMS and fall within
> the scope of a semester- or year-long graduate project.

I agree with Adams: take something that you find interesting.
There's the complete transcription by Takeshi Takahashi, done
by one person, therefore consistent. But there's also the 
interlinear file by Stolfi (based on an initial effort by
Gabriel). Both are waiting to be put to good use.
Avenues of attack that have not been used (or only in a limited
sense) are the use of genetic algorithms, or hidden Markov
models (some results of the latter are known). 

Seth Morabito wrote:

>  I may be echoing Jacques Guy's complaints, but it seems that
> we have got nowhere, though certainly not for lack of
> dedication or hard work.  

I am not so pessimistic. Maybe we've not been doing a good
job of showing the progress that has been made, say, since
D'Imperio's book has appeared. 

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Aug 23 14:49:54 2000
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From: Jason Morningstar <mornj@ils.unc.edu>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
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Forgive me if this topic has been done to death, but I haven't seen any
discussion of Yale's policy re: the VMS.  Has anyone approached the
Beinecke with the aim of making a digital or photographic copy for
research?  What about physical analysis? 

--Jason

----------
Jason Morningstar
School of Information and Library Science
UNC Chapel Hill


On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Adams Douglas wrote:

> Jason Morningstar wrote:
> > 
> > I hope this post sparks a general discussion of "work to be done", and I
> > would particularly value any opinion or advice on areas that would both
> > advance our understanding of the VMS and fall within the scope of a
> > semester- or year-long graduate project.  
> 
> I actually think the most important work to be done is some kind of
> forensic analysis of the VMs itself--especially non-invasive and
> non-destructive analysis such as examination under different frequencies of
> light.
> 
> As far as work to be done without actually going to Yale, there's so many
> things that can be done with the transcriptions we now have that were not
> available to previous researchers. Some of the other list members probably
> have more specific ideas on those lines.
> 
> It's best to first approach the manuscript in areas you feel most
> comfortable and confident in your abilities. I started by looking at the
> astronomical pages and seeing what could be gleaned from an
> archaeoastronomical perspective, since that's an ongoing interest of mine.
> I'm now getting more into the statistical properties of the text as I learn
> more about this aspect from other's work.
> 
> But welcome from lurker-land, and feel free to discuss your ideas.
> 
> -Adams
> 
> -- 
> ====================================================
> Adams Douglas, San Diego, CA   Adams@Douglas.net
> http://Adams.Douglas.net/
> PGP Public Keys: http://Adams.Douglas.net/pgpkey.txt
> <adamsd@crash.cts.com> 084E B706 E8D5 4C2E 1A43  ECE2 6B96 8018 6238 197A
> UTM:11S0487200 3623500 MGRS-2:11SMS872235 (100-meter)
> 
>      "I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking 
>       about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; 
>       but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in 
>       numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind."
>                               - William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)
> 
> 

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug 24 11:33:18 2000
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Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 08:29:54 -0700
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To: Jason Morningstar <mornj@ils.unc.edu>
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There was a ot of activity in that direction but lately the effort seems to have
waned. I don't know why, but maybe somebody on the list has an explanation.
Cheers, Mark Perakh

Jason Morningstar wrote:

> Forgive me if this topic has been done to death, but I haven't seen any
> discussion of Yale's policy re: the VMS.  Has anyone approached the
> Beinecke with the aim of making a digital or photographic copy for
> research?  What about physical analysis?
>
> --Jason
>
> ----------
> Jason Morningstar
> School of Information and Library Science
> UNC Chapel Hill
>
> On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Adams Douglas wrote:
>
> > Jason Morningstar wrote:
> > >
> > > I hope this post sparks a general discussion of "work to be done", and I
> > > would particularly value any opinion or advice on areas that would both
> > > advance our understanding of the VMS and fall within the scope of a
> > > semester- or year-long graduate project.
> >
> > I actually think the most important work to be done is some kind of
> > forensic analysis of the VMs itself--especially non-invasive and
> > non-destructive analysis such as examination under different frequencies of
> > light.
> >
> > As far as work to be done without actually going to Yale, there's so many
> > things that can be done with the transcriptions we now have that were not
> > available to previous researchers. Some of the other list members probably
> > have more specific ideas on those lines.
> >
> > It's best to first approach the manuscript in areas you feel most
> > comfortable and confident in your abilities. I started by looking at the
> > astronomical pages and seeing what could be gleaned from an
> > archaeoastronomical perspective, since that's an ongoing interest of mine.
> > I'm now getting more into the statistical properties of the text as I learn
> > more about this aspect from other's work.
> >
> > But welcome from lurker-land, and feel free to discuss your ideas.
> >
> > -Adams
> >
> > --
> > ====================================================
> > Adams Douglas, San Diego, CA   Adams@Douglas.net
> > http://Adams.Douglas.net/
> > PGP Public Keys: http://Adams.Douglas.net/pgpkey.txt
> > <adamsd@crash.cts.com> 084E B706 E8D5 4C2E 1A43  ECE2 6B96 8018 6238 197A
> > UTM:11S0487200 3623500 MGRS-2:11SMS872235 (100-meter)
> >
> >      "I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking
> >       about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it;
> >       but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in
> >       numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind."
> >                               - William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)
> >
> >

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From: Corey Snow <cyclometh@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
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Ooops. :-) Sent to a list member, now forwarded for
all to peruse. My comments are below. (>>). The
message was in response to the current thread on
images and the VMS.

Thank you for letting me know, Seth.

Corey Snow

--- sjm <sethm@loomcom.com> wrote:
> Hi Corey,
> 
> You accidently sent this message just to me, instead
> of to the list.
> You might want to resend it.
> 
> -Seth
> 
> On Tue, Aug 22, 2000 at 11:58:20PM -0700, Corey Snow
> wrote:
> > 
> > <snip>
> > 
> > I've not been privy to many of those
> conversations,
> > being a relative newcomer. Has anyone considered
> > approaching Yale and proposing a single,
> high-quality
> > set of images be done on the VMS, using standard,
> > infra, ultra and maybe x-ray photos, then burned
> to
> > CDROM? I would imagine that the bill for that
> wouldn't
> > be cheap, but the results would be invaluable to
> us. 
> > 
> > Maybe a collection could be taken up or something.
> :-)
> > 
> > Regards,
> > 
> > Corey Snow
> > 


__________________________________________________
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From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug 24 21:20:13 2000
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sjm (Seth Morabito) wrote:
>  I may be echoing Jacques Guy's complaints,

I did not mean it as a complaint, only an
observation.

> but it seems that we have got nowhere, though certainly not for lack of
> dedication or hard work.  It seems logical that one of three possible
> conditions is true:  

> [1] Either that we're all missing something very
> important which is right in front of our noses, 

>[2] or that we lack some
> vital piece of the puzzle without which we are lost, 

>[3] or that there is
> no answer to be had and the manuscript is a hoax.

If the manuscript is a hoax, I have a gut feeling 
that there should be some way of finding out, of
proving it. But again, I wonder: is there a 
continuum from real, meaningful text to glossolalia?
Perhaps there is. This question has never been
seriously addressed -- I do not mean regarding the
VMS, but in general. It could be a hoax, and still
be meaningful -- like Helen Smith's "Martian" or like
a science-fiction novel depicting a fantastic,
physically impossible world in an artificial 
language; or like a long recipe for producing the
philosophical stone, or diamonds from cow dung!

So, I believe that none of [1], [2], and [3] is
the case. In my view, we simply do not know
enough about language to tell where the VMS
stands. I don't know much about cryptography,
but the repetitive nature of the text, its low
entropy mean to me that -- *IF* it is a cipher:

1) it is full of nulls
2) it is a sort of Bacon cipher

But then, the plaintext would be very short, and
what about the label?

That is why, in my cryptographic ignorance, 
I do not think it can be a cipher proper.
Simple substitution, yes possibly, but beyond
that, no definitely.

Take the Codex Seraphinianus. Its page-numbering
system (base 21) has been cracked. Its author, Luigi 
Serafini, claims that the text is not gibberish.
Ivan Derzhanski has had a go at analysing it...
wait, let me do a search... there:

http://www.math.bas.bg/~iad/serafin.html

In my eyes, it is a very similar problem, and
I am glad that the editor of Dr Dobb's Journal
left in my remark that this (the VMS) is the
sort of problems which we must know how to solve
if we are ever to make contact with  alien
intelligences (extraterrestrial or not -- we very
possibly have some right under our noses now).

Frogguy

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug 25 04:30:27 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
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Dear all,
during looking for some examples of raeto romance (indo-european/etruscan
language) , I came to the following site:
http://www.silentnight.web.za/translate/

Here we got many languages at one place. So looking at the translation of
"stiile Nacht , heilige Nacht" , you can get a feeling of the language.
(maybe raeto romance is another candidate for the VMS underlying language ?)
Cheers
Claus
===================================
Claus Anders

debis Systemhaus GEI
Pascalstr. 8
52076 Aachen, Germany

phone:(+49) 2408/943-781          Fax: -430  
mailto:CAnders@debis.com
===================================



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Dear all,
during looking for some examples of raeto romance (indo-european/etruscan 
language) , I came to the following site:
http://www.silentnight.web.za/translate/

Here we got many languages at one place. So looking at the translation 
of "stiile Nacht , heilige Nacht" , you can get a feeling of the language.
(maybe raeto romance is another candidate for the VMS underlying language ?)
Cheers
Claus Anders


-- 
Get your firstname@lastname email for FREE at http://NamePlanet.com/?su

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug 25 21:39:51 2000
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To: voynich@rand.org
From: Gold <gold@ij.net>
Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
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Let me ask a question.  Or rather make a statement.

We have an idea of the voynich text but no one can READ it?

Turiyan

From reeds Fri Aug 25 14:14:31 2000
From: reeds@fry.research.att.com (Jim Reeds)
Message-Id: <1000825141431.ZM1751042@fry.research.att.com>
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 14:14:30 -0400
In-Reply-To: sjm <sethm@loomcom.com>
        "Re: Voynich research needs" (Aug 22, 14:47)
References: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0008221538430.1036-100000@ruby.ils.unc.edu> 
	<20000822144710.A1309@loomcom.com>
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As part of this thread,

On Aug 22, 14:47, sjm wrote:
 
> I personally feel that the single most useful research tool we could have
> is a very high quality color photographic reproduction of the manuscript.
> We have discussed this matter to death in the past, even rather heatedly,
> but it never hurts to revisit it in summary.
...
> 
> At any rate, fresh eyes looking at the problem can never hurt.
> Welcome to the discussion, and good luck!

Yes.  Fresh eyes looking at good photocopies.  That's what's needed.

Over a year ago now, one of our members, Mark Perakh, announced
that he had a wealthy friend willing to bankroll production of a
high quality photocopy of the the VMS. After some initial
discussion, Mark chose me to look into just how we should go about
doing this. (In Mark's terms, to figure out to whom the donor should
send the check.) Which I have been doing ever after. I picked an
informal "board of advisors" of about 10 people most active in this
list and in the eary list discussion of how to spend the Perakh
donation (which really comes from Mark's generous friend).

I have sent copies almost all of my email discussion to the board
of advisors (which includes Mark) all along, keeping them abreast
of what's up on this project.  At many times I have received a lot
of help from the advisors, both in clarifying issues and in
explaining technicalities.  I think they are truely representitive
of the "Voynich research community" and that almost everyone will
be happy with the outcome of the project.

Now on to details.  There are two potential vendors I have talked
with.  One, the Beinecke Library itself, was almost prepared to
make a digital scan for us,  but after months of negotiating,
decided not to.  Their reason not to was apparently based entirely
on their feeling that their scanning equipment and staff were not
technically capable of doing the job as we wanted it done, for the
price we could pay.  They suggested we approach the other vendor
(whom I had contacted early on in the project but put on hold
while the Beinecke negotiations were underway).  This vendor
is more technically competent than the Beinecke photo department,
and has better equipment.  But they are also pricier, and we may
have to pass the hat around for a few extra thousand dollars to
pay for the job.

Jim Gillogly (this list founder, perhaps the country's top amateur
cryptanalyst, and more importantly, a member of my "board") and I
visited the offices of this vendor and had a 2 hour chat with the
boss. He will prepare a formal proposal (with variously priced
options which I will discuss with my advisors) in a few weeks and
if all goes well, scanning will commence this fall.

In general terms, we would get a high resolution color scan of
the whole VMS, with something like 70 megabytes of TIFF file per
page.  These master images  will be delivered on a set of CD roms.
I am pretty sure that Yale will also recieve a copy of the same
set.  We might also recieve a set of derived JPEG images.  What we'd
do with these master images is, I suppose: make a backup copy or
2; circulate them by sneaker net to the hard core researchers;
make derived JPEGs for easier distribution.  If Yale makes a
CD rom of JPEG derivatives we don't have to, but if they don't,
maybe we could.  At any rate, the present project is to accomplish
the scan, not to publish a CD.

As a final comment:  Yale's stance on permissions seems to have
taken a radical turn for the better and they seem to favor this
project.  It used to be popular to bad-mouth the Beinecke Library
in this forum, but I think its completely inappropriate now.




-- 
Jim Reeds, AT&T Labs - Research
Shannon Laboratory, Room C229, Building 103
180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971, USA

reeds@research.att.com, phone: +1 973 360 8414, fax: +1 973 360 8178

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References: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0008221538430.1036-100000@ruby.ils.unc.edu> <20000822144710.A1309@loomcom.com> <39A5C9D8.DC06984F@alphalink.com.au>
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Seth Morabito wrote:

> > [1] Either that we're all missing something very
> > important which is right in front of our noses,

I think so. What we're missing is that the MS was written
by someone in the 15th or 16th C and we have to understand
the person's mindset and environment. What could he have known
and what material could he have had available when writing
the VMs? _How_ could he have created a hoax? I'm not saying
that he could not have, but just wondering how...

> >[2] or that we lack some
> > vital piece of the puzzle without which we are lost,

We lack various useful pieces of the puzzle, but we are as
lost as a person in a maze who hasn't yet found the way out
but may still do so. Until the last corner, all hedges look
exactly the same, and there may be little indication of getting
closer to the exit until you suddenly hit upon it.

> >[3] or that there is
> > no answer to be had and the manuscript is a hoax.

See above.

Frogguy then wrote:

> If the manuscript is a hoax, I have a gut feeling
> that there should be some way of finding out, of
> proving it.

I am pretty sure that most of us have a different
understanding of what constitutes a hoax. If it dates from
a more recent time than it appears to, then I consider it
to be a hoax. But if it dates from 1470 (give or take a
couple of decades, being generous), when should we call it
a hoax? 

> But again, I wonder: is there a
> continuum from real, meaningful text to glossolalia?
> Perhaps there is. This question has never been
> seriously addressed...

I could imagine that there could be (which means nothing
- let's assume that there is indeed a continuum).
Is a document filled with glossolalia a hoax? 

Is there any other example of glossolalia accompanied
by a multitude of scientific drawings? Some of them
involve realistic plant drawings. Others include non-
existent plants though with details that can be seen
in nature. The astro/zodiac pages clearly show 
astronomical knowledge by the author too.

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug 25 21:32:28 2000
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Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 01:31:41 +0000
From: Jim Gillogly <jim@acm.org>
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Welcome to the new members I've just added to the list, and to
the others that I've been adding more regularly since the last
administrivia message.  This would be a good time for people to
summarize what they're working on and to give a web page (if
any) for further reading.  I'll suggest Jim Reeds' page as a
starter -- it has links to most of the others.  It's at:
http://www.research.att.com/~reeds/voynich.html .  Jim has a
good archive of the list's messages, but don't expect it to be
updated in real time.

A few notes for the newbies and reminders for the dinos:

- In keeping with the medieval nature of the Manuscript, this list
  run on software constructed with stone knives and bearskins.  In
  particular, it is not a majordomo list.

- Never send administrative messages to voynich@rand.org -- they
  should all go to jim@acm.org .  They will be acted on in due
  course, which could be within the hour or within the month,
  depending on my workload and scuba diving schedule.

- Messages for the entire group go to voynich@rand.org.

- If you haven't gotten Voynich mail for a month, or if it drops
  off abruptly in the middle of a heated exchange, let me know.
  When email addresses bounce for several days I remove them from
  the list without ceremony.  Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL addresses are
  all welcome, but may get a little less slack than more permanent
  addresses when bouncing starts.

- Turn off HTML and don't send attachments to the list.
  Plain text only, please.  URLs are welcome for data sharing.
  Eschew obnoxiously long signatures and meaningless legal
  disclaimers.

Unlikely as it may seem after almost 90 years of the modern
age of Voynich analysis, I have the impression that we're actually
beginning to make progress, in terms of observations of more
observed structure and improved access.

We currently have 130 list members.

Welcome to the list!
-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	Highday, 13 Afterlithe S.R. 2000, 05:39
	12.19.7.6.7, 1 Manik 10 Tzec, First Lord of Night

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug 25 22:31:41 2000
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Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 22:31:47 -0400
To: voynich@rand.org
From: Daniel Harms <dmharms@acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: Hoaxes (was Re: Voynich research needs)
In-Reply-To: <39A6DFA4.1FE69B7C@voynich.nu>
References: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0008221538430.1036-100000@ruby.ils.unc.edu>
 <20000822144710.A1309@loomcom.com>
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At 11:05 PM 8/25/2000 +0200, you wrote:

>I am pretty sure that most of us have a different
>understanding of what constitutes a hoax. If it dates from
>a more recent time than it appears to, then I consider it
>to be a hoax. But if it dates from 1470 (give or take a
>couple of decades, being generous), when should we call it
>a hoax? 

I wouldn't call it a hoax, necessarily, in either case.  To judge whether
something is a "hoax", we have to have some indication as to what 
motivated its creation.  

If I wrote an account of a Roman general's stay in Spain, and published 
it as fiction, or kept it to myself for my own private amusement, it
would not constitute a hoax.  If I sold it, telling people that it was a
translation of the Roman general's original document, that would be a 
hoax.  But it might be difficult to tell the difference, if that judgement
is based strictly on the document itself.

I think it's useful to determine whether the Voynich is a hoax, but my
point here is that historic inaccuracy does not necessarily point to a hoax,
in the way I understand the term.

Yrs.,


Daniel Harms     dmharms@acsu.buffalo.edu
The Internet:  Learn what you know.  Share what you don't.

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Aug 25 23:05:25 2000
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Daniel Harms wrote:
> 
> At 11:05 PM 8/25/2000 +0200, you wrote:
> 
> >I am pretty sure that most of us have a different
> >understanding of what constitutes a hoax. If it dates from
> >a more recent time than it appears to, then I consider it
> >to be a hoax. But if it dates from 1470 (give or take a
> >couple of decades, being generous), when should we call it
> >a hoax?
> 
> I wouldn't call it a hoax, necessarily, in either case.  To judge whether
> something is a "hoax", we have to have some indication as to what
> motivated its creation.

I exhibited some strong evidence that the Beale Ciphers are
a hoax in a paper for Cryptologia in 1980.  The demonstration
didn't give any indication of the motivation for the hoax, but
was nevertheless convincing -- to most people without a stake
in the ciphers' legitimacy, anyway.  It consisted of showing that
long monotonic alphabetic strings appeared when a fairly obvious
"decryption" was performed on the unknown part of the cipher.

I would call it a hoax if it turned out to be provable nonsense:
it's still an old manuscript, but it's presented as an herbal or
other scientific treatise, so that kind of content would indicate
that somebody constructed it to con someone else for some reason.
Being able to prove something is nonsense is rather rare in
cryptography -- normally you can either break it or not, but
without being able to prove there's no solution.  If a really
simple model for the text were found (e.g. a finite-state automaton
with not too many states and symbols) that produced precisely
the Voynich text or even a single page of it, that would be an
indication that it was constructed according to a table or formula,
and did not have a lot of semantic content.

I don't really expect us to find such an automaton, and in fact
I suspect the work already done on Hidden Markov Models for the VMs
would turn up many of the consistencies one would expect from this
type of construction.
-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	4 Halimath S.R. 2000, 02:42
	12.19.7.8.18, 13 Edznab 1 Mol, Seventh Lord of Night

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug 26 14:29:21 2000
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Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 11:28:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dan Moonhawk Alford <dalford@haywire.csuhayward.edu>
To: rene@voynich.nu
Cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
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On Fri, 25 Aug 2000, Rene Zandbergen wrote:

> Is a document filled with glossolalia a hoax? 
> Is there any other example of glossolalia accompanied
> by a multitude of scientific drawings? Some of them
> involve realistic plant drawings. Others include non-
> existent plants though with details that can be seen
> in nature. The astro/zodiac pages clearly show 
> astronomical knowledge by the author too.

Folks, glossolalia is a complete dead end here. I could be wrong, tho I've
been around glossolalia most of my life, but I've never heard of written
glossolalia. We should say "glossolalic speaking" to be clear. Glossolalia
is a HUMAN ability, tho it may be used to praise the divine, which sends
emotional, not cognitive, content to the speech production centers, using
the same phonemic inventory and phonetic set of the daily language of the
glossolaliac.

I believe any writing of such a nature would have to be referred to as
"automatic writing," which is done in an altered state of consciousness,
and is thus seldom "neat," as we find in the VMs -- much less illustrated. 

warm regards, moonhawk

dalford@haywire.csuhayward.edu
<http://www.sunflower.com/~dewatson/alford.htm>

"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines!" 
                                                   -- Roy, Mystery Men



From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug 26 14:42:58 2000
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From: reeds@research.att.com (Jim Reeds)
Message-Id: <1000826144246.ZM1874245@fry.research.att.com>
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 14:42:46 -0400
In-Reply-To: reeds@research.att.com (Jim Reeds)
        "Denis Mardle" (Jul 31, 22:08)
References: <1000731220839.ZM939182@fry.research.att.com>
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To: reeds@research.att.com (Jim Reeds), voynich@rand.org
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A friend pointed me to Mardle's obituary in the (London) Times,
printed 15 August.  Denis Mardle, CBE, born 1929, died on
July 31, was appointed head of the cryptanalysis division of
the GCHQ in 1982.  We are indirectly mentioned in the last
paragraph of the obit.

It is on line at http://www.the-times.co.uk/ if you click on
the "now you can search the Times online" caption.  Enter
a date range covering 15, enter the word "Mardle", and click
"search".

-- 
Jim Reeds, AT&T Labs - Research
Shannon Laboratory, Room C229, Building 103
180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971, USA

reeds@research.att.com, phone: +1 973 360 8414, fax: +1 973 360 8178

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug 26 15:20:24 2000
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From: Adams Douglas <adamsd@cts.com>
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Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
To: dalford@haywire.csuhayward.edu (Dan Moonhawk Alford)
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 12:19:17 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0008261115260.15248-100000@haywire.csuhayward.edu> from "Dan Moonhawk Alford" at Aug 26, 2000 11:28:06 AM
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Dan Moonhawk Alford wrote:
> 
> I believe any writing of such a nature would have to be referred to as
> "automatic writing," which is done in an altered state of consciousness,
> and is thus seldom "neat," as we find in the VMs -- much less illustrated. 

  "The castle ARRRGH"
  "What?"
  "The castle ARRRGH"
  "What does that mean?"
  "He must have died while carving it."
  "Oh, come on. If he died he wouldn't write ARRRGH, he would just say it!"
  "Perhaps he was dictating."
                 - Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Sorry, couldn't resist. :)

Anyway, moonhawk, in your studies of glossolalia have you run into automatic
writing that is equivalent to spoken glossolalia or does the act of writing make
"automatic writing" fundamantally different in content and/or statistical
properties then spoken glossolalia?

-Adams

-- 
====================================================
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From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug 26 17:19:17 2000
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From: Brian Moroz <bmoroz@rocketmail.com>
Subject: Re: Voynich research needs (automatic writing)
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-does the act of writing make
> "automatic writing" fundamantally different in
> content and/or statistical
> properties then spoken glossolalia?
> 
> -Adams


I'm new to the list, but I'm going to jump right in on
this one and hope I don't repeat anything already
mentioned.  
The act of automatic writing, as I have ever seen it
performed, does not produce letters or ideograms of
any discernable variety.  It produces a series of
lines and curves that are almost totally random.  It
is the act of emoting through the pen.  The mss is
clearly written by someone who uses an alphabet, and
sentence structure.  Statistics cannot be used to
analyze automatic writing, unless you look at the
ratio of curves to lines or some equally esoteric
statistic method. 

 Personally (and I'm about as far from an expert on
this as one can be), I think that one can count out
automatic writing when referring to the VMs.  As for
hoaxes, great and small, I believe the paper sold for
quite a sum in it's youth, and there's always a
powerful, wealthy fool looking for more power.  Were I
a poor but intelligent scribe I might have concocted a
scheme one night...

I for one hope the manuscript can be broken one day,
and is not a pure hoax.  The fact that there is a
motive ($), the means (any creative person with some
time on their hands),  and the inability to crack the
thing lead one to at least consider the possibility,
though.

-Brian
-
> 

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere!
http://mail.yahoo.com/

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Aug 26 17:21:40 2000
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Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 14:20:49 -0700
Subject: Re: Hoaxes (was Re: Voynich research needs)
From: Jordan Lund <lundj@earthlink.net>
To: Jim Gillogly <jim@acm.org>, <voynich@rand.org>
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> I would call it a hoax if it turned out to be provable nonsense:
> it's still an old manuscript, but it's presented as an herbal or
> other scientific treatise, so that kind of content would indicate
> that somebody constructed it to con someone else for some reason.
> Being able to prove something is nonsense is rather rare in
> cryptography -- normally you can either break it or not, but
> without being able to prove there's no solution.  If a really
> simple model for the text were found (e.g. a finite-state automaton
> with not too many states and symbols) that produced precisely
> the Voynich text or even a single page of it, that would be an
> indication that it was constructed according to a table or formula,
> and did not have a lot of semantic content.

    Just de-lurking here for a moment... it could still have semantic
content and still be a hoax. E.G. the "Necronomicon" that was published in
the early 80's which is still listed as "Occult" in most book-stores...
(for those of you that don't know, it's a fictional book of Magic invented
by H.P. Lovecraft, in the early 80's a publishing house took a bunch of
translated works from Sumer and other sources and tried to pass it off as a
mysteriously obtained "Necronomicon".)


                                            - Jordan
                                            lundj@earthlink.net

********************************************************************
* "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the  *
*  man who cannot read them." - Mark Twain                         *
******************************************************************** 

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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
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Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
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    > [Seth Morabito:]

    > [1] Either that we're all missing something very important which
    > is right in front of our noses,
    >
    > [2] or that we lack some vital piece of the puzzle without which
    > we are lost,

My feeling is that the answer is somewhere between [1] and [2].

I have long been convinced that the manuscript is written in an
"exotic" (meaning non-European) language, with a peculiar spelling
system that was devised by the author --- probably a "phonetic" spelling
(i.e based on the spoken language, not on its native script.)

Until recently I was quite convinced that the language was some Asian
"syllabic" language like Chinese, Vietnamese, Tibetan, Thai, etc. (an
idea that I stole from Jacques, although he himself did not seem to
take it too seriously). I got that conviction chiefly because of the
peculiar structure of Voynichese "words", which is quite unlike that
of Indo-European or Semitic words, but fairly similar to that of
syllables in a phnetically rich language. 

There were other arguments too, such as the shape of the word length
distribution, the apparent lack of syntactic patterns, the apparent
absence of numerals (or letters used as numerals), and the general
"weirdness" of the book. And that theory could explain why crypto
heavyweights like Friedman did not get anywhere.

In my recollection, the main arguments that were raised against the
"Chinese theory" were (1) the supposed historical impossibility of an
obviously European book being written in Chinese, at the required
time; (2) the lack of any oriental-looking features in the
illustrations; and (3) an apparent mismatch between the statistics of
Chinese syllables and Voynichese words.

I believe that the first argument is easily dismissed: there were
enough channels and contacts between Europe and East Asia to make such
a book possible, in many scenarios. The second argument could also be
explained in several ways --- an European author, an European copyst,
or an Asian author who was trying to imitate the looks of European
books. And the third argument was almost surely based on inadequate data:
the "pinyin Tao" sample that was used for comparison, besides being a
rather special text, is not a phonetic rendering of spoken
Chinese---of the 1500's, or any other period---but merely a
conventional transcription of the ideograms. 

So I kept believing
in some variant of the Chinese theory---until a few months ago,
when I happened to run a simple statistical test (suggested by
Bradley Schaefer).  If we map each Voynichese word to the number of gallows
that it contains, we get the following text:

    ?1110110           110000000001       11110001      
    00000110           11111110           1110100       
    1000?1110          00?10011110        ??100100      
    1110100001         01010000011        00000000      
    01010000011        010010?10                        
    111011111          110000101          11110101100   
    111010001          000001000          1110001000100 
    00??1101           10010?10           010101000101  
    11011??0?          000000001          ?11111001010  
    0100110110         10100000           011100110     
    1101011001         00100010?          ...

>From previous analysis, I already knew the sequence would contain
almost exclusively 1s and 0s; but I was expecting them to be randomly
interleaved. Instead, the 1s and 0s tend to be clustered in runs of
same value. Said another way, there is a strong correlation between
the presence or absence of gallows in adjacent words.

This unexpected feature of Voynichese throws a monkey wrench into the
Chinese theory. (My only consolation is that it is bad news for many
other theories as well.) I find it hard to imagine a spelling system
for a Chinese-like language that would produce this effect.

It is true that, in spoken Mandarin, the tone of a syllable affects
the pronounciation of the next syllable -- an effect called "tone
sandhi" by linguists. However, as far as I know, this effect happens
with only a fraction of the syllables, and the resulting correlation
does not seem to extend very far.  Perhaps the effect is more
pronounced in some other Asian language (Tibetan? Thai?), but I am 
not optimistic.

So now I am not so keen on the Chinese theory any more. I still
believe in some of its premises, though. First, to me, the
"natural-looking" word statistics say that Voynichese is not a
cryptographic system, but merely an exotic language rendered in an
original alphabet. Second, I take the the rigid structure of the
"words" as proof that they are actually single syllables.
But the strong correlation of the "gallows bit" seems to 
rule out East Asian languages.

That feature does not seem to fit any Indo-European language, either.
Bradley himself suggested that the gallows could be a marker for
gender or number; the correlation would then be a shadow of typical IE
case agreement rules. However, this explanation would require the text
to consist mainly of strings of 3-4 adjectives modifying the same noun
--- which seems unlikely, even for a "madman's rant". Moreover, the
gallows letters usually occur near the beginning of the word; why
would an IE-speaking author do that? And, finally, the Voynichese
words seem too short and too rigidly structured to be IE words.

These same arguments seem to rule out Semitic languages, and Finnish
as well.  So what is left?

There is one language family that may fit the bill.  In Turkish and
other related languages (e.g. Uzbek), many concepts that are expressed
by separate words in English are realized as suffixes (usually one syllable
long) attached to some "head" word.  Moreover, the vowels are divided into 
two sets, "front" and "back"; and the suffixes must always use vowels
of the same class as those of the head word. 

Thus, it looks like we can explain the observed features of Voynichese
by assuming that it is actually Turkish, with each "word" being either
a head word or a suffix. The gallows letters would then denote one
class of vowels; the other class would be represented by some
non-gallows letters or combinations.

This "Turkish theory" has a few more arguments in its favor. For one
thing, Turkish generally avoids vowel-vowel pairs and isolated vowels,
which fits with the absence of gallows-gallows pairs and isolated
gallows in Voynichese. Moreover, while suffixes are usually one
syllable long, and thus contain only one vowel, head words may have
two or more syllables; and, as John Grove once pointed out,
two-gallows words are often found at the beginning of lines, and in
labels --- where head words should be found.

It is curious that the correlation appears to be confined to the
"gallows bit"; other binary attributes that I have tried do not show
this effect --- and, as far as I know, there is no obvious
multi-syllable correlation in Turkish other than the front/back
vowel harmony.

Turkish is historically plausible as well (far more so than Chinese or
Tibetan, I must admit). In the Middle Ages, Turkey was a major player
in the Muslim world, and had a flourishing alchemical and medical
literature of its own. Indeed, there are many Turkish manuscripts in
the Prague National Library.

Moreover, until the 1920's, Turkish was written in the Arabic script,
which is quite unsuited to the language, While Arabic has only three
vowels, Turkish has 8; and while Arabic vowels usually denote
inflections, in Turkish (as in IE languages) they are part of the
lexical entry. Thus, an European (or a transplanted Turk) who had to
write a text in Turkish would have had a good motivation for inventing
a new script for the language.

Finally, plump nymphs payfully splashing in ponds and tubs is a 
scene that does not seem exactly out of line with a Turkish origin.
Public baths (with separate days for men and women) were a big thing in 
Turkish society, as among the Romans. And I recall seeing
images os a famous hot spring place in Turkey, where the pools
are surrounded by travertino formations that resemble some
of the VMs "tubs".

So, where do we go from here? To follow up on this lead, one would need 
knowledge of medieval Turkish, which I obviously do not have.
Perhaps we can find lists of turkish star names and match them to the 
labels in the astro/zodiac section...

    > [3] or that there is no answer to be had and the manuscript is a
    > hoax.

This may seem an easy way out, but it is not. The VMs text has
remarkable structure and consistency, with roughly the expected amount
of variation across and within sections. Its word statistics are
remarkably similar to those of natural languages, while the
distribution of letters within words is quite peculiar but not
obviously mechanical.

So anyone who proposes solution [3] has the burden of explaining how
the author could have produced a text with those features. As far as I
can see, the word statistics and the peculiar word structure cannot be
reproduced by a simple mechanical method, with or without
dice-throwing steps --- even if we allow for context-dependent
word-breaking rules. A sufficiently contrived scheme could perhaps
generate the small-scale structure, but not the long-range one (such
as page- and section-specific words).

So, if the manuscript is a hoax, it must be the result of feeding some
natural language text through a (partly?) mechanical scrambling
procedure. But this kind of "hoax" would not be much different from a
bona-fide undeciphered text (except perhaps that under the "hoax"
theory the text doesn't have to be related to the pictures, and the
percentage of "coding mistakes" may be quite high).

Moreover, there would remain the question of why the author went to so
much trouble, when he could have created a much more exciting hoax
with much less effort.

All the best,

--stolfi

PS



From reeds Sat Aug 26 23:30:12 2000
From: reeds@fry.research.att.com (Jim Reeds)
Message-Id: <1000826233012.ZM1901864@fry.research.att.com>
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 23:30:11 -0400
In-Reply-To: djl <djl@montana.com>
        "RE: Voynich research needs" (Aug 26, 20:30)
References: <01C00F9C.78424E20.djl@montana.com>
X-Mailer: Z-Mail (4.0.1 13Jan97)
To: voynich@rand.org
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Status: OR

Since my recent posting about the scanning project a number of
people have written to me offering to help pay for the job.
I hope that in a few weeks we will know how much money (if any)
we need; I am certain we will have no trouble in raising it.

In the mean time, thanks to all such offers, and apologies for 
not answering them individually.

-- 
Jim Reeds, AT&T Labs - Research
Shannon Laboratory, Room C229, Building 103
180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971, USA

reeds@research.att.com, phone: +1 973 360 8414, fax: +1 973 360 8178

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Aug 27 18:05:46 2000
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Reply-To: "John Grove" <John@morewood.net>
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Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
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----- Original Message -----
From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
To: <voynich@rand.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2000 7:29 PM
Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
> > There is one language family that may fit the bill.  In Turkish and
> other related languages (e.g. Uzbek), many concepts that are expressed
> by separate words in English are realized as suffixes (usually one
syllable
> long) attached to some "head" word.  Moreover, the vowels are divided into
> two sets, "front" and "back"; and the suffixes must always use vowels
> of the same class as those of the head word.

    Does this mean you're ready to give up that pizza?  Well, first I'd like
to quote Katzner's Languages of the World: "As in all Altaic languages, most
Turkish words adhere to the principle of vowel harmony -- that is, all the
vowels in a given word belong to the same class (front or back) and any
suffixes added generally contain vowels of the same class."

    Now, Altaic includes quite a wide variety - and the above statement
seems to suggest all Altaic languages[Not just the Turkic ones] have the
same Front/Back vowel sets. Some of those Altaic languages border on China -
so maybe your pizza bet is still vaguely safe-- with say the Tungusic
languages like Manchu?

    Nonetheless, I agree that the Turkic languages hold certain agreeable
possibilities... The Arabic influence in the writing system (back to the
lack of doublets again, or even the Titles at the bottom of the pages), the
Turkish Public Baths and Jorge's 'Front vowel indicating Gallows'.  All,
unfortunately circumstantial and heavily dependant on one's perception. Gut
feel doesn't quite make it a good theory.  But, I like it. So what sort of
statistics do we have for Turkic languages?

    One problem I see is word-length due to the fact that Turkish keeps
adding those suffixes making some long words that might extend beyond the
average word length we're looking for(unless they were written as
syllables...)
Again from Katzner's : "Yurt ormanlariyla yesil, yurt dagbaslariyla mavi"

    Lastly, among the Turkic languages are a few that certainly venture into
Eastern Europe and would be in an acceptable geographic region for the VMS.

    John

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Aug 27 19:07:39 2000
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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
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Subject: Turkish theory (was: Voynich research needs)
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    > [John Grove:] "As in all Altaic languages, most Turkish words
    > adhere to the principle of vowel harmony -- that is, all the
    > vowels in a given word belong to the same class (front or back)
    > and any suffixes added generally contain vowels of the same
    > class." Now, Altaic includes quite a wide variety - and the
    > above statement seems to suggest all Altaic languages[Not just
    > the Turkic ones] have the same Front/Back vowel sets.
    
Yes, I suppose so.  (Does Hungarian have vowel harmony, too?) 
    
    > One problem I see is word-length due to the fact that Turkish
    > keeps adding those suffixes making some long words that might
    > extend beyond the average word length we're looking for (unless
    > they were written as syllables...)
    
But that is exactly my point: if Voynichese is Turkish, each
Voynichese word must be a single Turkish headword or suffix. This
assumption is practically mandated by the word-length statistics, and
is necessary to explain the gallows-bit correlation as resulting from
vowel harmony.

    > Does this mean you're ready to give up that pizza?
    
Yeah, I am now expecting to lose that bet 8-(  

Methinks that, in fairness, the pizza should be due only when and if
the Chinese theory is satisfactorily disproved. One way to do that, of
course, is to find a convincing non-Chinese solution. If you think
that this criterion is too demanding, please suggest another one.
(Perhaps we should nominate an arbiter?)

    > Some of those Altaic languages border on China - so maybe your
    > pizza bet is still vaguely safe--with say the Tungusic
    > languages like Manchu?

Thanks, I will pass that suggestion to my lawyer... 8-)

All the best,

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Aug 27 23:00:47 2000
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Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 03:02:21 +0000
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Jorge Stolfi wrote:
 
> So I kept believing
> in some variant of the Chinese theory---until a few months ago,
> when I happened to run a simple statistical test (suggested by
> Bradley Schaefer).  If we map each Voynichese word to the number of gallows
> that it contains, we get the following text:
> 
>     ?1110110           110000000001       11110001
[snip]
>     0100110110         10100000           011100110
>     1101011001         00100010?          ...
> 
> >From previous analysis, I already knew the sequence would contain
> almost exclusively 1s and 0s; but I was expecting them to be randomly
> interleaved. Instead, the 1s and 0s tend to be clustered in runs of
> same value. Said another way, there is a strong correlation between
> the presence or absence of gallows in adjacent words.
> 
> This unexpected feature of Voynichese throws a monkey wrench into the
> Chinese theory.

No it doesn't. I had noticed that too, just looking at the
transcription,
how there is a sort of "gallows agreement". My explanation (which
I never posted here) was that the gallows had no phonetic value,
but were gender/number markers (feminine singular, feminine plural,
masculine singular, masculine plural). Then you could expect such
a pattern. Now that was only one of several explanations I had
thought of. Voynichese might have as many genders -- noun categories
if you prefer -- as gallows. That could be a real feature of the
language, or an artificial addition if Voynichese is an artificial,
"philosophical" language. It  could be a real language with this
feature, and it could be Chinese with this feature added. Once 
again, we are back to square one.

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Aug 28 04:32:29 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> when I happened to run a simple statistical test (suggested by
> Bradley Schaefer).  If we map each Voynichese word to the number of gallows
> that it contains, we get the following text:
> 
>     ?1110110           110000000001       11110001
[snip]
>     0100110110         10100000           011100110
>     1101011001         00100010?          ...

This is a very interesting observation. I have one question.
Doesn't this clumping appear in other languages if we choose the 
right letters? 
There are very vague reasons to consider ktpf as the same class of 
letter (at least I am not 100% sure that they are the same). 

So far the issues suggesting that they could be are:
* Some are listed in Cappelli's Dict. as ornate forms
* They look similar
* Some (can't remember which) does not appear in the f 57 
sequence (so it may be an alternate form of another letter).
* They (f, p) occur at paragraph starting position.

But if I remember correct, the digraph distributions of the gallows 
were quite different.

Any comments?

Regards,

Gabriel

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Aug 28 07:37:33 2000
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Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 11:35:53 +0000
From: Rene Zandbergen <rene@voynich.nu>
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Frogguy quoted Stolfi:


> >     ?1110110           110000000001       11110001
> [snip]
> >     0100110110         10100000           011100110
> >    1101011001         00100010?          ...
> >

> > From previous analysis, I already knew the sequence would contain
> > almost exclusively 1s and 0s; but I was expecting them to be randomly
> > interleaved. Instead, the 1s and 0s tend to be clustered in runs of
> > same value. Said another way, there is a strong correlation between
> > the presence or absence of gallows in adjacent words.

and wrote:

> I had noticed that too, just looking at the transcription,
> how there is a sort of "gallows agreement". My explanation (which
> I never posted here) was that the gallows had no phonetic value,
> but were gender/number markers (feminine singular, feminine plural,
> masculine singular, masculine plural). 

How about the following:
Yesterday I did a very short count of words in an Arabic text
(a modern print of a very old astronomical text, not sure precisely
in which language). I counted the number of  appearances of 'al' 
and got strings of 1's and 0's not unlike the ones above. I never
saw more than three successive '1's in the short sample I looked at,
but longer strings of 0's did occur. This fits my very limited
understanding of Arabic too. 

As to what is reasonable to expect in the VMs and what not (Turkish,
Chinese, Klingon), my personal view is that whatever a person in 
Central or Southern Europe may have had in his hands by the end
of the 15th Century may be something he somehow used as a model.
The middle East and parts beyond are all very well possible.
Of course, postulating something for which we now have no evidence
that it was in Europe as this time makes for a less tenable theory
(but not impossible). 

Finally, those who have ventured into the scans of the catalogue of
books in Rudolf's museum will have seen that R had a large
collection of Turkish books indeed...
  
No, one more thing. I am in more trouble than Stolfi, since I
forgot what I put my pizza bet on. (I still remember what should 
be on my pizza, which clearly shows my priorities :-) ).

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Aug 28 08:27:39 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: determining the word-break character in VMS
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 14:27:15 +0200
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Dear all,
just for fun I wrote a small awk-script to determine the word-break
character and got the following results:
#        min         avg.     		max     char
------------------------------------------------------------------
31529	1	5.73269		13	.
20720	1	8.57968		59	o
16974	1	8.71916		76	e
16036	2	10.6487		81	h
13974	2	10.825		72	y
12108	2	12.5189		82	c
11760	1	11.7747		113	a
10990	1	9.73012		78	i
10774	1	12.645		113	d
9550	2	14.0578		76	k
8423	1	14.2798		79	l
6082	1	20.0636		114	s
5906	1	16.4927		115	r
5842	1	16.9921		109	t
5180	3	19.9332		114	q
5076	3	18.6377		77	n
1458	3	24.3395		87	p
388	3	25.616		90	f
313	1	18	   	 78	*
309	1	17.5049		68	m
19	3	35.3158		74	x
2	43	54.5		66	j

IMHO the word-break char "." is really the word-break because
	- it's the most common character at all
	- the average word length is statistically with min and max
Comments ?
Claus
===================================
Claus Anders

debis Systemhaus GEI
Pascalstr. 8
52076 Aachen, Germany

phone:(+49) 2408/943-781          Fax: -430  
mailto:CAnders@debis.com
===================================



From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Aug 28 08:43:36 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Brute Force attack on VMS
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 14:43:04 +0200
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Dear all,
has someone tried a brute force attack on the VMS ?
If not, why ? And if, got any results ?
(brute force-> try every possible combination of char to vms-char ordered or
random chosen and the looking up the outcome (for example the 1st page)
Claus

===================================
Claus Anders

debis Systemhaus GEI
Pascalstr. 8
52076 Aachen, Germany

phone:(+49) 2408/943-781          Fax: -430  
mailto:CAnders@debis.com
===================================



From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Aug 28 08:54:45 2000
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Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 02:56:04 -1000
From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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> in some variant of the Chinese theory---until a few months ago,
> when I happened to run a simple statistical test (suggested by
> Bradley Schaefer).  If we map each Voynichese word to the number of gallows
> that it contains, we get the following text:
> 
>     ?1110110           110000000001       11110001
>     00000110           11111110           1110100
>     1000?1110          00?10011110        ??100100
>     1110100001         01010000011        00000000
>     01010000011        010010?10
>     111011111          110000101          11110101100
>     111010001          000001000          1110001000100
>     00??1101           10010?10           010101000101
>     11011??0?          000000001          ?11111001010
>     0100110110         10100000           011100110
>     1101011001         00100010?          ...
> 
> >From previous analysis, I already knew the sequence would contain
> almost exclusively 1s and 0s; but I was expecting them to be randomly
> interleaved. Instead, the 1s and 0s tend to be clustered in runs of
> same value. Said another way, there is a strong correlation between
> the presence or absence of gallows in adjacent words.

Is there any known linguistic reason for this occurrence?  It
looks somewhat like a behavioral artifact of the writer.  I
think if I were given the task of 'throwing in a null here and
there' I would produce similar patterns because I would be good
about it for a while, then forget for a while, then come back. 
Even using a coin flipping method, I would still exhibit times
when I was good about flipping the coin and when I was bad about
it.  A two cipher system with the a Gallows representing a
change in cipher or a specific gallows representing a certain
cipher might produce the same result as the writer got lazy
about switching.  If the gallows are just ornate versions of
letters I put in when I was in the mood, a similar pattern might
still appear. I've even seen people online typing Chinese pinyin
who do the same thing with numbers at the end to mark tones,
although a further element is thrown in because at times they
break a toneless run because the pinyin needs a tone to be
clear.  Perhaps there is a non-linguistic behavioral study that
might point out patterns similar to the appearance or lack of
the gallows.  Beyond the runs, it's interesting to see that if
the gallows is a habit of some kind, the writer seems better
about it in all of the places you might guess, labels,
beginnings of paragraphs and lines, etc.

Regards,
Brian Farnell

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Aug 28 14:23:34 2000
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Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 14:30:42 -0400
From: John Stojko <oko@worldnet.att.net>
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Subject: Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
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"Anders, Claus" wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> has someone tried a brute force attack on the VMS ?
> If not, why ? And if, got any results ?
> (brute force-> try every possible combination of char to vms-char ordered or
> random chosen and the looking up the outcome (for example the 1st page)
> Claus
> 

Yes I did and continue to use in brut force decipherment.
But to use brut force you have to, 1st define the family
of language you will apply your brut force.
That is, Indo-European, Chinise, Arabic ets.
Once you define than all languages in this family should be
taken into consideration. None of them should be excluded.

Visit my Home Page and see the result.
http://home.att.net/~oko/home.htm

John Stojko

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Aug 29 11:05:08 2000
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From: Grant Covell <GCovell@c-bridge.com>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: RE: Voynich research needs
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 11:00:00 -0400
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Hello--

Perhaps this is an obvious question and is answered somewhere, but has
someone kept or created a list of all the techniqes that have been tried,
all the languages that the text has been evaluated against, all the
different subject areas the folks on this list come from, etc.? 

Essentially, I was wondering if there was an inventory of this team's
collective efforts and experience. Gaps would become clear. Areas that could
be probed more might emerge. Areas that have been exhaustively examined can
be set aside and efforts expended elsewhere.

Just an idea; Again, apologies if this already exists.

Grant.

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Aug 29 11:44:01 2000
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Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 15:44:26 +0000
From: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
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Subject: Re: determining the word-break character in VMS
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"Anders, Claus" wrote:

> IMHO the word-break char "." is really the word-break because
>         - it's the most common character at all
>         - the average word length is statistically with min and max
> Comments ?

Off the top of my head, without calculating any statistics, I
would say that in Hungarian the letter e is more common than
word-breaks (e.g. egyesgedre!). And again, in Arabic breaks
between letters do not correspond to word breaks, thus anhar
"rivers" is written a-space-nha-space-r because a (alif) 
cannot connect to the next letter. Likewise dar "house" is
written d-space-a-space-r.

No, we cannot be sure at all.

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Aug 30 00:20:58 2000
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From: Gold <gold@ij.net>
Subject: Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
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At 08:43 AM 8/28/00 , Anders, Claus wrote:

>Dear all,
>has someone tried a brute force attack on the VMS ?
>If not, why ? And if, got any results ?
>(brute force-> try every possible combination of char to vms-char ordered or
>random chosen and the looking up the outcome (for example the 1st page)
>Claus

An empiric brute force attack would take a lot of time and energy and would
seem
inappropriate for what is probably, essentially, a non-empiric cipher.....

Turiyan

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Aug 29 17:28:46 2000
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Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 23:34:41 +0200
From: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene Zandbergen)
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Dear all,

Grant Covell wrote:

> Perhaps this is an obvious question and is answered somewhere, but has
> someone kept or created a list of all the techniqes that have been tried,
> all the languages that the text has been evaluated against, all the
> different subject areas the folks on this list come from, etc.?

Well, one day I hope to achieve that at my web site, but right now this
is extremely incomplete. I can therefore recommend to you (and all other 
newcomers) to have a look into the mailing list archive which Jim Reeds
keeps at his site. This has really got *everything* and there are
definitely a lot of long-forgotten, valuable hints and trails in there.
Of course, this archive is organised strictly chronologically, so you
need to 'wade through'.
Absolutely worth the effort though.

Cheers,  
        Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Aug 30 03:13:07 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'Jacques Guy'" <jguy@alphalink.com.au>, voynich@rand.org
Subject: AW: determining the word-break character in VMS
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 09:10:56 +0200
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> " [Anders, Claus]  Jacques Guy  " wrote:
> 
> 
	[Anders, Claus]  > Off the top of my head, without calculating any
statistics, I
	[Anders, Claus]  > would say that in Hungarian the letter e is more
common than
	[Anders, Claus]  > word-breaks (e.g. egyesgedre!). And again, in
Arabic breaks
	[Anders, Claus]  > between letters do not correspond to word breaks,
thus anhar
	[Anders, Claus]  > "rivers" is written a-space-nha-space-r because a
(alif) 
	[Anders, Claus]  > cannot connect to the next letter. Likewise dar
"house" is
	[Anders, Claus]  > written d-space-a-space-r.

	[Anders, Claus]  > No, we cannot be sure at all.
	[Anders, Claus]  What I wanted to show with my calculations, that
with "." as word/token break the min/average/max word/token length is
consitently within range. If "e"/"o" (or any other char) would be the break
char, then max word/token length will be far to big.
	("o" as break char would produce a max length of 59, whereas "." has
words of max 13 char)
	Claus

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Aug 29 23:43:08 2000
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Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 11:44:20 -0400
From: Bruce Grant <bgrant@mail.msen.com>
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Subject: Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
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There are an awful lot of combinations. For example, for even a 26 letter
alphabet there are
26! or about 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 mappings from the alphabet into
itself.

Bruce Grant

"Anders, Claus" wrote:

> Dear all,
> has someone tried a brute force attack on the VMS ?
> If not, why ? And if, got any results ?
> (brute force-> try every possible combination of char to vms-char ordered or
> random chosen and the looking up the outcome (for example the 1st page)
> Claus
>
> ===================================
> Claus Anders
>
> debis Systemhaus GEI
> Pascalstr. 8
> 52076 Aachen, Germany
>
> phone:(+49) 2408/943-781          Fax: -430
> mailto:CAnders@debis.com
> ===================================

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Aug 30 14:16:35 2000
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To: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
Cc: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
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On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Anders, Claus wrote:
> has someone tried a brute force attack on the VMS ?
> If not, why ? And if, got any results ?
> (brute force-> try every possible combination of char to vms-char ordered or
> random chosen and the looking up the outcome (for example the 1st page)

As well as being prohibitive in terms of time (there are a *lot* of
possible permutations of an alphabet), this approach assumes that the VMS
*is* a simple letter-for-letter substitution cipher.  We have strong
theoretical reasons to believe that it isn't - the statistical properties
of the text are in some ways quite different from those of text in a known
language encrypted by simple substitution.  If the VMS were a simple
substitution cipher, there would be much easier ways to break it than
brute-force anyway.

Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca              I'm recording the boycott industry!
http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug 31 05:32:42 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca'" <mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>
Cc: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
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	 Matthew Skala wrote:
	 
	> As well as being prohibitive in terms of time (there are a *lot*
of
	 > possible permutations of an alphabet), this approach assumes that
the VMS
	 > *is* a simple letter-for-letter substitution cipher.  We have
strong
	> theoretical reasons to believe that it isn't - the statistical
properties
	 > of the text are in some ways quite different from those of text
in a known
	 > language encrypted by simple substitution.  If the VMS were a
simple
	> substitution cipher, there would be much easier ways to break it
than
	> brute-force anyway.

	Maybe it's a simple     letter-for-letter substitution cipher with a
substution depending on the position of the character within the word, for
example:
	Text: 
		This Book is written in chinese 
	gives 
		Tikv Bpqn it wskwxjt io cikqixk ...
	where I simply replace the nth char. in the word with same letter+n
in the alphabet (with an one to one char mapping). With this approach I get
produce the same code for the same word but double characters in the
original text are code to different chars and a same character  sequence in
the code was coded from different char in the org. text.
	However this coding scheme cannot explain the abundance of single or
double char "words" in the VMS.
	Cheers 

	Claus  

===================================
Claus Anders

debis Systemhaus GEI
Pascalstr. 8
52076 Aachen, Germany

phone:(+49) 2408/943-781          Fax: -430  
mailto:CAnders@debis.com
===================================



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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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On 31 Aug 2000, at 11:31, Anders, Claus wrote:
>   This Book is written in chinese 
>  gives 
>   Tikv Bpqn it wskwxjt io cikqixk ...
>  where I simply replace the nth char. in the word with same letter+n
> in the alphabet (with an one to one char mapping). 

Shouldn't this be:
Ujlw Cqto ju xtlxyku jp djlrjyl ?
I mean starting with the position '1'?

I wonder what the character distribution and the entropy of this 
would be. Each word is always written the same, but the word 
construction is completely different.

Does this encoding method have a name?

Cheers,
Gabriel



From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug 31 06:19:57 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'G.Landini@bham.ac.uk'" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Cc: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: AW: Brute Force attack on VMS
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 12:19:18 +0200
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yes, if the 1st char starts with 1 and not 0.
I don't know of any name. I just wondered what method could produce such an
encoding , that we get always the same code for the same word.
If you like, I can write a small awk script, encode an english Text (which
one?) and run an entropy test on the result.
Claus

> -----Ursprngliche Nachricht-----
> Von:	Gabriel Landini [SMTP:G.Landini@bham.ac.uk]
> Gesendet am:	Donnerstag, 31. August 2000 11:55
> An:	voynich@rand.org
> Betreff:	Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
> 
> On 31 Aug 2000, at 11:31, Anders, Claus wrote:
> >   This Book is written in chinese 
> >  gives 
> >   Tikv Bpqn it wskwxjt io cikqixk ...
> >  where I simply replace the nth char. in the word with same letter+n
> > in the alphabet (with an one to one char mapping). 
> 
> Shouldn't this be:
> Ujlw Cqto ju xtlxyku jp djlrjyl ?
> I mean starting with the position '1'?
> 
> I wonder what the character distribution and the entropy of this 
> would be. Each word is always written the same, but the word 
> construction is completely different.
> 
> Does this encoding method have a name?
> 
> Cheers,
> Gabriel
> 
> 

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug 31 19:19:50 2000
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Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:21:07 -1000
From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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To group:
Not to criticize by any means, just a subject that I have been
wondering about for several months now.  One of the criteria
that was set down for Voynich (on one of your pages) was that it
had to be able to be read back in real time.  Has something in
the tradition of old manuscripts come to light that makes us
deviate from that?  It seemed logical at the time, I was just
wondering if there was something you stumbled across elsewhere
that opened up the playfield or if we are just trying things
outside of the original assumptions.
Also, if anybody has any suggestions on materials or guidance
for all of this black-arts math you are doing, I'd love to get
involved in it.  I have a good math background, but I never have
applied it to cryptology.
Regards,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug 31 20:46:36 2000
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From: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
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I see another impossibility there.
Suppose that a brute force attack is
feasible. Now, of all the billions
of alternative decipherments it
produces, how do we tell which is
the right one, short of examining
them? Not only that, but since we
really do not know the language of
the VMS... it is like having ten
trillion roomfuls of monkeys hacking
away at typewriters and sifting 
through the results to find which
reproduces Shakespeare's works,
allowing for translations into 
other languages, from 12th-century
French to modern Georgian via Portuguese
as it will be spoken in Macao in 3800 AD!

Frogguy

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Aug 31 22:36:43 2000
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From: mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca
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Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 19:30:42 -0700 (PDT)
To: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
Cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
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On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Jacques Guy wrote:
> is feasible. Now, of all the billions of alternative decipherments it
> produces, how do we tell which is the right one, short of examining
> them? Not only that, but since we really do not know the language of
> the VMS... it is like having ten trillion roomfuls of monkeys hacking

The overwhelming majority of decipherments won't make sense in any
language and can thus be ignored.  If we're using a computer, it's easy to
program it to recognize things that might make sense, at least well enough
to narrow the problem down to few enough candidates that humans can
examine them all.  A more significant problem is what happens where there
are several decipherments that all appear to make sense.  I think that
problem sorts itself out when we consider the question in information
theoretic terms.

When we make a guess about how the manuscript should be deciphered, that
can be seen as our supplying a certain amount of information that wasn't
there to begin with.  If the output of our attempted decipherment contains
very much more information than we supplied, then we can guess that it
must be correct - the extra information must have come from the
ciphertext.  On the other hand, if the amount of information in the
decipherment is comparable to the amount we supplied, it doesn't look good
for the decipherment being correct.

I may be slightly abusing the mathematical definition of information here,
but I'm not sure of a better word to describe what I mean.  Let me give an
example.  Suppose I have this cipher:

  "gppcbs"

I could say "Well, that's a Vigenere cipher, with the key 'klpkxh'; the
plaintext is 'weasel'."  But the amount of information I'm supplying
("it's a Vigenere cipher" and "the key is 'klpkxh'") is a significant
fraction of (indeed, quite a bit more than) the amount of information in
'weasel'.

On the other hand, I could say "It's a Ceasar-shift, each letter of the
ciphertext is the one after the corresponding letter of plaintext; the
plaintext is 'foobar'."  The amount of information in "Caesar shift by one
place" seems to be much smaller.  I think it should be obvious which of
these decipherments is preferable.

We can quibble about the exact amount of information added by the
decipherer in these two decihperments, and even though the information
theorists have a definition it's not much help because it requires that we
assign probabilities to the events we're measuring and we could never
agree on those probabilities.  But I feel certain that if we ever find a
correct decipherment, the amount of information it needs to supply will be
so much smaller than any other candidate decipherments as to make the
argument brief.

This criterion is the reason I'm not convinced by claims of decipherments
that require the manuscript to be written in some natural language with
the vowels removed.  There the amount of information the decipherer must
add (by putting the vowels back in) is much too big a fraction of the
information content of the final product.

Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca              I'm recording the boycott industry!
http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  2 02:01:24 2000
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Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 20:01:07 -1000
From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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I know this doesn't hold true for all languages, but this is
back to Occam'a Razor:

Supposing Voynich is like many of the languages that would make
logical candidates because of sheer numbers (ie, not tonal or
vowel-less), shouldn't it in comparison to them on a graph show
a similar mathematical function of the relationship between
entropy and word length?  My idea is this, the more predictable
the sequence of letters, the less value each has as a data bit,
therefore one would expect a highly predictable language to have
a longer word length than an unpredictable one.  Take an extreme
example of "qu" in English where it adds to the predictability
while making every 'qu' equal to one 'bit' as opposed to two and
increasing the word length of all 'q-words'.  This doesn't seem
to follow in Voynich, so that leaves three possibilities of an
incorrect assumption, and generating potentially good values for
two of the incorrect ones.  

1) If the word length as it stands now is wrong, then, given the
entropy, we should be able to generate a reasonable range for
the real word length and be able to check which character as
word break character gives us a value in that range.
2) Assuming that the entropy is wrong because the cipher
generates a different entropy than the underlying text, given
the word length, we might be able to generate a range for the
entropy and play with ciphers to see which kind alters the
entropy in a similar way (perhaps again a function).
3)  Voynich is in a really screwy language that has some feature
that gives its letters or some of it's letters the power to
convey more data than a conventional letter (like a tone mark).

Actually there is a fourth, that both the word length and the
entropy are wrong.

A good extreme data point on the graph might be generated with a
language like Hawaiian or Tahautl.

Regards,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  2 02:18:49 2000
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From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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To: G.Landini@bham.ac.uk, Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Re: Brute Force (+n cipher)
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Claus Anders wrote:
> > where I simply replace the nth char. in the word with same letter+n
> > in the alphabet (with an one to one char mapping).
> 
Gabriel Landini wrote:
> I wonder what the character distribution and the entropy of this
> would be. Each word is always written the same, but the word
> construction is completely different.

Just a guess off the top of my head, the effect on entropy could
be very different depending on the language.  For example, where
two letters often occur together at the beginning of the word,
they will still always be reflected in an analogous pair,
however, if you take a language heavy in endings after an
variable number of letters like Russian, those values get
muddled.  Basically, all contributions to predictability from
initial sequences and/or prefixes stand as they are.  I'm not
sure what the splitting of each standard ending/suffix into 4 or
5 analogous pairs would do mathematically, my brain keeps going
one way then the other on it.
Regards,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  2 02:51:45 2000
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From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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To: Bruce Grant <bgrant@mail.msen.com>, Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Re: Brute Force (information levels/'though')
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Deviation from normal Zipf distribution of short words in the
Voynich MS:

While on the subject of information levels, using a written
alphabet may or may not introduce errors into an analyses of a
natural language.  How much information is apparently contained
in the English word 'thatch' when written as opposed to when
spoken.  Shouldn't the Zipf distributions mostly reflect the
spoken form rather than the written, especially at a time when
most people were illiterate?  Imagine an aphabet like Cherokee
(this may be a bad example, but follow me) which was created at
the time when it had had all of it's phonological influences
(for then) and was designed to cover it's own bases, versus
English which had to do things like create a 'th' combination
because of the addition of the voiced and unvoiced 'th' sounds. 
When you use a Roman alphabet to express a language with many
unexpresssable sounds, you get long words that are short on
phonemes, which are your real data points for Zipf.  Also add
odd spellings from words for whatever reason and you get
"though", a word that should be much shorter according to Zipf. 
It actually is very short, it is only two phonemes even THOUGH
it now takes six letters to write.  Of course we can't break
Voynich into phonemes with any certainty, but we might be able
to use deviations from normal Zipf distributions to tell us what
kind of alphabet or language it is, ie a language with heavy
ouside influences and an old alphabet, or an alphabet invented
in the times of the manuscript for a particular language.  
Regards,
Brian

