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From: Z-Mail (4.0.1 13Jan97)
Date: Mon Jan  1 12:53:00 2001
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From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep  1 04:25:00 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Organization: The University of Birmingham, UK.
To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 09:23:55 +0100
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Subject: Re: Real Time Qualifier
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On 31 Aug 2000, at 13:21, Brian Eric Farnell wrote:

> 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.  

I don't remember real-time decoding being put as a condition to 
prove a solution.
I do think (but this is just a guess) that given the size of the vms its 
author may have been able to read it back with little effort, but I 
doubt that there will be a proof for that until the ms. is cracked.

Gabriel
 

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep  1 08:31:06 2000
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Reply-To: "John Grove" <John@morewood.net>
From: "John Grove" <4groves@sprint.ca>
To: "Voynich List" <voynich@rand.org>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0008311907260.6252-100000@diamond.ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>
Subject: Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 08:29:08 -0400
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----- Original Message -----
From: <mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>
To: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
Cc: <voynich@rand.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2000 10:30 PM
Subject: Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
>... 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/
>

    While I agree that some claims of decipherment take too much leisure in
deciding how to 'replace' the vowel content in a consonant only text, I'm
not so sure you can toss the basic concept into the trash so easily.

    Some earlier claims have ignored word spacing, added several vowels when
the author needed them to make a word work, conveniently chose alternate
readings for a given letter (like r or s in EVA) to the one that could make
a word, etc.  However, if a language is written in its natural state without
vowels - and is enciphered with a simple substitution with the VMS odd
character set, one doesn't have to 'add' vowels per se - unless you're a
foreigner and want to pronounce the words with some degree of accuracy. Now,
I can't say for sure that this line of thinking will ever result in
anything, but I'm not ready to discard the possibility that a vowel-less
(really vowel-limited) writing system is part of the underlying structure.

    In Arabic 'jumhuuriyya' is written with only 'jmhuria' - some vowels are
present, but several are understood. The Arabic word for 'sentences' is
'jumal' written with only the three letters 'jml'. Recently, Jorge has
ventured into the Turkic realm of languages as well - Turkish itself used
the Arabic script, although unsuited for the language, for a number of
centuries. I don't know enough about these (Turkic) languages to say
absolutely that a consonant based writing system was used effectively to
make recording information easily understood by a learned reader, but it
seems to me that a few centuries of forced use of an Arabic script on a
non-Arabic language leans toward the probability that a set of linguistic
rules 'could' govern the use of this type of system on several other
language families.

    John Grove


From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  2 10:27:45 2000
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Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2000 04:26:29 -1000
From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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I remember back when I was getting Chinese stuffed into my head
24/7 by the military I had friends taking Arabic.  One of the
common jokes they made was about how every idea seemed to be
required to have a reference to Allah.  I'm sure they were
exaggerating somewhat, but it just struck me.  What if the
references to Allah were replaced by a gallows character or
encoded with the various aiin bothers?  In a Christian setting
they might be replaced even in an enciphered text because of
fear of a heresy charge and to a non-arab, they are almost
meaningless background noise, except that they sometimes serve
as markers for things like tense (I think).  I was told that
future tense could be expressed 'if Allah wills it'.  I don't
really know much about Arabic except the complaints I heard from
people who started adding 'humdilluh' to every English phrase as
a joke.  Does anyone out there know enough about Arabic to tell
me if this is a valid idea?  Are there any similar things in
other languages?
Regards,
Brian

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To: John Grove <John@morewood.net>
Cc: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
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On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, John Grove wrote:
> a word, etc.  However, if a language is written in its natural state without
> vowels - and is enciphered with a simple substitution with the VMS odd
> character set, one doesn't have to 'add' vowels per se - unless you're a
> foreigner and want to pronounce the words with some degree of accuracy. Now,

I actually wrote, and then deleted because I thought it could be
confusing, a paragraph saying that "if the vowels could be added by a
purely mechanical process, it's less of a problem".  Just as you say, some
languages may be naturally written without vowels.  In that case, the
"missing" vowels can be added unambiguously - there's only one sensible
way to do it.

If the vowels can be added unambiguously, then by adding the vowels one
isn't adding information.  Information is by definition surprise.  If the
vowels are determined by the consonents, and you know the consonents, then
finding out what the vowels are isn't any sort of surprise.  There's no
information there.  My criterion of "minimal added information" is still
applicable.

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

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep  1 11:32:57 2000
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Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 08:32:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dan Moonhawk Alford <dalford@haywire.csuhayward.edu>
To: John Grove <John@morewood.net>
Cc: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Syllabics -- was Brute Force attack on VMS
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I'm very interested in John's line of reasoning below, that perhaps we're
dealing with syllabic information, already vowel-less, being put into
Voynichese, thus obviating the need for it to be aloud-readable.

It inspired this lunacy: what if ... the syllabics being enciphered were
ancient Egyptian texts? The vowels would be predictable morphologically --
but they would be mostly triliterals, way easy to spot. Oh, well. I assume
anything Egyptian was ruled out long ago.

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



On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, John Grove wrote:

> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>
> To: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
> Cc: <voynich@rand.org>
> Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2000 10:30 PM
> Subject: Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
> >... 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/
> >
> 
>     While I agree that some claims of decipherment take too much leisure in
> deciding how to 'replace' the vowel content in a consonant only text, I'm
> not so sure you can toss the basic concept into the trash so easily.
> 
>     Some earlier claims have ignored word spacing, added several vowels when
> the author needed them to make a word work, conveniently chose alternate
> readings for a given letter (like r or s in EVA) to the one that could make
> a word, etc.  However, if a language is written in its natural state without
> vowels - and is enciphered with a simple substitution with the VMS odd
> character set, one doesn't have to 'add' vowels per se - unless you're a
> foreigner and want to pronounce the words with some degree of accuracy. Now,
> I can't say for sure that this line of thinking will ever result in
> anything, but I'm not ready to discard the possibility that a vowel-less
> (really vowel-limited) writing system is part of the underlying structure.
> 
>     In Arabic 'jumhuuriyya' is written with only 'jmhuria' - some vowels are
> present, but several are understood. The Arabic word for 'sentences' is
> 'jumal' written with only the three letters 'jml'. Recently, Jorge has
> ventured into the Turkic realm of languages as well - Turkish itself used
> the Arabic script, although unsuited for the language, for a number of
> centuries. I don't know enough about these (Turkic) languages to say
> absolutely that a consonant based writing system was used effectively to
> make recording information easily understood by a learned reader, but it
> seems to me that a few centuries of forced use of an Arabic script on a
> non-Arabic language leans toward the probability that a set of linguistic
> rules 'could' govern the use of this type of system on several other
> language families.
> 
>     John Grove
> 
> 
> 

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Sep  3 05:49:49 2000
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Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2000 23:47:17 -1000
From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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I found the answer and some further historical data on a
question asked recently while I was muddling through the old
Voynich list archives.  The question is below and the answer
from a 1994 post by Jim Reeds follows.
Regards,
Brian

Gabriel Landini wrote:
> 
> 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

Post from 1994:

reeds@research.att.com wrote:
> 
> The other day I dropped in to the Bancroft library in Berkeley and looked
> at their Schott and Selenus, which date from roughly the same era as the
> Heidel book.  In one of them (I forget which, but I think it was Selenus)
> there is an explanation of a progressive key cipher, according to which
> this paragraph would be enciphered "Ujh synlz..."
> 
> Jim Reeds

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  2 05:55:36 2000
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From: "ddhopper" <ddhopper@earthlink.net>
To: <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Language in the Voynich
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 04:56:11 -0500
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Forgive me for de-lurking.  I only want to get some facts straight.  All the
talk seems to go back and forth between the possibility of cipher and the
strong belief that language is the source.  Are we talking about open
language, or enciphered language in these exchanges?  Surely there's a
method of telling the difference.

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Sep  3 06:29:22 2000
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Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 00:27:17 -1000
From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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I am very much interested in making a substantial contribution
to the project timewise.  Through planning and good luck, I do
not need to work right now, and through some bad luck I am only
enrolled in one class this semester (linguistics of phonology). 
If there is any time consuming work that needs to be done I am
more than willing to pitch in here.  Below is my description of
what applicable skills I have.  At the very least, I could work
on transcription, if there is any more to be done.

-  Good natural ability with math, I was on speed math teams in
High School.  My math, though never went beyond Calculus 1 and
that was ten years ago, but I am willing and able to learn

-  Studied languages from an early age.  My formal training came
in High School and College with two years of German, one year of
French, and two years of Spanish in High School.  In college I
followed with another semester of German and two semesters of
Russian.  I confess these are almost completely forgotten, but I
have had a broad lingusitic  exposure.

-  Entered the military with the official job designation as a
cryptologist, though almost all of my work was in translation
instead of cryptology.  While in the Navy, I was trained to a
fluent level in Mandarin Chinese and still maintain a level
higher than when I graduated, which was estimated as good enough
to enroll in a Chinese University.

-  Started doing simple programming at the age of 8 on an old
TRS-80, I never got terribly good, but I have a good knack for
these things, enough that I was able to teach myself to write
little shell script programs on the Sun stations while I was in
the military.  Incidentally, these were almost all little grep
routines for sorting and analyzing data files (and I must add,
quite a bit better than the ones THEY supplied us with).

-  Currently studying Speech Language pathology at the
University of Hawaii, though I also have a decent background in
psychology before I changed area of interest.

-  Finally, through a longtime childhood interest, I am decently
versed in the occult.  I'm not talking about the Necronomicon or
some new age books, but the ceremonial magick like the Golden
Dawn (even though thats a recent invention) and the Kabballah
that might actually have bearing on some of these old
manuscripts. I claim to be no expert by any means, but I'm not
ignorant either.  (I did make a basilisk once but he died and
I'll probably never find an egg laid by a rooster again to prove
I can do it)

One big limitation I have right now, is that I no longer have
access to a Sun, and I haven't taken the time to get really
familiar with my PC clone, it's mainly a toy to write e-mail,
pirate music and play on Chinese web sites.  Is there anyway to
run all of those neat little grep and cat routines on this
machine without having to shell out some big bucks to buy a
language?

Regards,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep  1 20:21:25 2000
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Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 08:21:02 -0400
From: Bruce Grant <bgrant@mail.msen.com>
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Matthew Skala recently wrote::
>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.

To me it doesn't seem so strange to think that someone might leave the
vowels out of a text like this, since we often do it in daily life:
"Pls rmbr to gt a qrt of mlk".  However, this doesn't work for rarely
used words, new concepts and so on.

If the text is ordinary, it seems plausible. What I don't like is when
someone adds back the vowels and still gets text which is disjointed and
weird.

Bruce Grant

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  2 11:28:07 2000
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Reply-To: "John Grove" <John@morewood.net>
From: "John Grove" <4groves@sprint.ca>
To: "Voynich List" <voynich@rand.org>
References: <39AFBC95.9581C0B2@gte.net>
Subject: Re: Arabic
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 11:31:49 -0400
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----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2000 10:26 AM
Subject: Arabic
>  I was told that
> future tense could be expressed 'if Allah wills it'.  I don't
> really know much about Arabic except the complaints I heard from
> people who started adding 'humdilluh' to every English phrase as
> a joke.  Does anyone out there know enough about Arabic to tell
> me if this is a valid idea?  Are there any similar things in
> other languages?
> Regards,
> Brian

    I'm not an Arabic linguist and thus can't vouch for the above, although
it is quite interesting. However, there are an awful lot of Gallows in the
VMS.

    On a side note in regards to Arabic, I've got an old instructional book
that says you add the prefix 'sa' to an imperfect verb to gain future tense
(incidentally, that is only an 's' that you add when writing). Looking at
the verbs in the book though raises another possibility for the 'q' in 'qo'
words that are normal VMS words without the 'q' prefix:
                Perfect Verbs
Imperfect Verbs
type    Pattern  Example(Written/Spoken)        Pattern
Example(Written/Spoken)
I       CaCVCa      sdr/shadara                        yaCCVCu
ysdr/yashduru
II      CaCCaCa    srH/sharraHa                     yuCaCCiCu
ysrH/yusharriHu
III     CaaCaCa     gadr/ghaadara                    yuCaaCiCu
ygadr/yughaadiru
V      taCaCCaCa tHdt/taHaddatha                yataCaCCaCu
ytHdt/yataHaddathu
X      istaCCaCa    istgrq/istaghraqa                yastaCCiCu
ystgrq/yastaghriqu

   So, oteedy and qoteedy? o = Ca  tee = CCa d= Ca  [y=?]   and q = ya/yu

Does this work with Jorge's OKOKO paradigm?

    John Grove

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From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  2 16:24:57 2000
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Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 14:23:07 -0600 (MDT)
From: "Annette M. Stroud" <astroud@du.edu>
Subject: Re: Arabic
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On Sat, 2 Sep 2000, John Grove wrote:

> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
> To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
> Sent: Friday, September 01, 2000 10:26 AM
> Subject: Arabic
> >  I was told that
> > future tense could be expressed 'if Allah wills it'.  I don't
> > really know much about Arabic except the complaints I heard from
> > people who started adding 'humdilluh' to every English phrase as
> > a joke.  Does anyone out there know enough about Arabic to tell
> > me if this is a valid idea?  Are there any similar things in
> > other languages?
> > Regards,
> > Brian
> 
>     I'm not an Arabic linguist and thus can't vouch for the above, although
> it is quite interesting. However, there are an awful lot of Gallows in the
> VMS.

There are number of letter combinations in Arabic that get written in
vertical combination.  The gallows letters might be representing that or
something like that.

Annette (forgetting more arabic than I ever learned)

From reeds Sun Sep  3 11:44:50 2000
From: reeds@fry.research.att.com (Jim Reeds)
Message-Id: <1000903114450.ZM3196158@fry.research.att.com>
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 11:44:49 -0400
In-Reply-To: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
        "VMS List post from 1994" (Sep  1, 23:47)
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Brian Farnell dredged up an old post of mine, naming the
"progeressive" cipher and giving an imprecise 1600s date for
it:

reeds@research.att.com wrote:
> 
> The other day I dropped in to the Bancroft library in Berkeley and looked
> at their Schott and Selenus, which date from roughly the same era as the
> Heidel book.  In one of them (I forget which, but I think it was Selenus)
> there is an explanation of a progressive key cipher, according to which
> this paragraph would be enciphered "Ujh synlz..."

In fact this cipher is described in Trithemius's "Clavis 
Polygraphiae" printed in 1518 with his "Polygraphiae Libri Sex":
(in the section headed "Explantio in quintum librum polygraphiae
nostrae brevis", fol. [B iv] = about p.531.)

> Verum ut ordinem uideas, ponamus exe[m]plu[m]. Hxpf gfbmcz
> fueib gmbt gxhsr ege rbd qopma uwu, wfxegk ak,
> tnr qxyx. Huius mystici sermonis sententia est. Hunc caueto
> uiru[m], quia malus est, fur, deceptor, me[n]dax & iniquus. 


approx. trans:
To show you the correct order, we give an example.  Hxpf ...
...  The sense of this mysterious writing is: "Hunc caueto ... "

Here Hunc gets enciphered as Hxpf because H+0=H, u+1=x (in the
Latin alphabet without v or w), n+2=p, c+3=f, and so on.


-- 
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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From: Claus_Anders@t-online.de (Claus Anders)
To: <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Trithemius progressive cipher
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 19:51:34 +0200
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Jims Reds wrote:
>In fact this cipher is described in Trithemius's "Clavis 
>Polygraphiae" printed in 1518 with his "Polygraphiae Libri Sex":
>(in the section headed "Explantio in quintum librum polygraphiae
>nostrae brevis", fol. [B iv] = about p.531.)

>> Verum ut ordinem uideas, ponamus exe[m]plu[m]. Hxpf gfbmcz
>> fueib gmbt gxhsr ege rbd qopma uwu, wfxegk ak,
>> tnr qxyx. Huius mystici sermonis sententia est. Hunc caueto
>> uiru[m], quia malus est, fur, deceptor, me[n]dax & iniquus. 


>approx. trans:
>To show you the correct order, we give an example.  Hxpf ...
>...  The sense of this mysterious writing is: "Hunc caueto ... "

>Here Hunc gets enciphered as Hxpf because H+0=H, u+1=x (in the
>Latin alphabet without v or w), n+2=p, c+3=f, and so on.

So, Trithemius was in fact a C-Programmer (Fact:index started with 0 instead
of 1 ;-)).

Back to business:
This cipher has some interesting features (Garbriel Landini poited to this
too)
1. Within a word no character will be encode twice to the cipher char.
2. The word structure will be preserved
3. This cipher will not change the entropy of the text.

So, if (and why not) our author of VMS used a cipher like this, how did he
produce a code with such low h2 entropy?
In discussion with Gabriel. I wrote a small programm an d applied the cipher
to some text in different languages. Even when adding some redundancy to the
code (like doubling every vocal), I was not able to produce  such a low
h2-entropy and not even come close to the h2-h1 number of the voynichese.
So I wonder, is there any coding scheme, which will produce such a low h2
and enlarge the average word length? 
Or, is the any language, with a low entropy -> high redundancy, with has a
low char count/word and prseverse such properties ?

Claus



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From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Sep  3 15:34:35 2000
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Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2000 21:41:40 +0200
From: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene Zandbergen)
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Brian Eric Farnell wrote:

> .....  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. 

There is indeed an odd contradiction in Voynichese here.
Words are relatively short, character sequences are rather predictable,
still the vocabulary size is quite normal. Voynichese is thus
more 'economical' than, say, Latin or English.
I tried to look into this problem in http://www.voynich.nu/wordent.html
but that addresses a few other things as well.

One possible solution to this apparent contradiction would be if,
indeed, Voynichese words are really only syllables or parts of words
(like in Arabic). A few questions to which I don't have the answers are:
how many different syllables are there in Latin or English. And how
does their number grow with increasing text size. Is there an agreed
manner of splitting Latin words into syllables?

The answers could be quite interesting. 
I had hoped to use one of the existing word processing packages to
split a text into syllables (by enabling hyphenation and setting a
rediculously
short line length) but this has not worked so far.

Cheers, Rene

PS: I just recovered from a complete mail and net wipe-out (no virus, 
fortunately). Antoine: could you resend me your E-mail address please?

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep  4 21:27:48 2000
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From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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> 
> On 4 Sep 2000, at 13:50, Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> > Which brings me to the other thread: what we need is a word game
> > which both reduces entropy and word length, still keeping the
> > vocabulary size reasonable. 
...
> I think that the fact that the vms word structure seems very much
> constrained is very puzzling (Stolfi's OKOKOKO structure)
...
> Why on earth <daiin> and <aiin> are so common and sometimes
> repeated or run together?
> 
> Why the <m>, <g>, <j> are so common at the end of lines and <q>
> at the start of words?

Just an embryonic thought, I know it has been suggested before,
but I haven't yet seen some one suggest it because of a
mathematical reason.  What about, rhyming, meter, assonance,
consonance and other poetry word games?  Perhaps some literary
scholar out there has some suggested pieces of poetry that have
rigid styles but differ from one another.  An analyses of each
one of them, compared to a standard prose text in the same
language might give us some ideas about what literary devices do
what to a natural language.  
Regards,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep  4 02:51:11 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: organization of the VMS operation
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Hi,
I just wondered how the VMS operation was set up, when the whole thing
started:
- the parchment must be baught (how much did it cost then, were there shops
or traders, were they custom made ?
- how was the actual writing organized: what kind of material was used for
scratch scripting (plain text and first encoding) ?
- how much had the producer of the script to invest before the could sell it
?
I don't know if the anwers to these question are in the recent mailing lists
(too much to wade through now).
So maybe we should make a conclusion of the recent mailing lists to
summarize the agreed facts.
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  Sun Sep  3 16:21:14 2000
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Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2000 04:23:49 -0400
From: Bruce Grant <bgrant@mail.msen.com>
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Rene Zandbergen wrote:

> A few questions to which I don't have the answers are:
> how many different syllables are there in Latin or English. And how
> does their number grow with increasing text size. Is there an agreed
> manner of splitting Latin words into syllables?

There seems to be a standard way of breaking Latin words into syllables.

As described in Bennett's _New Latin Grammar_ the rules are:

1.    There is one syllable per vowel or diphthong {ae, oe, ei, ou).
2.    Single consonants go with the following syllable: vo-lat.
3.    Double consonants are always separated:  mis-sus.
4.    Other clusters of consonants are split with the first going to the
preceding syllable: mon-strum.
        Exception: if the cluster consists of a mute (p, t, c, k, q, b,
d, g, ph, ch, th) followed by l or r,
        both go with the following syllable: pa-tris.
        Exception to exception:  if this occurs because of a prefix
added to a word (ad + latus) the
        division is as ad-latus, not a-dlatus.
5.    X (pronounced k+s) goes with the previous syllable (ax-is) since
it can't be divided.

Bruce

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep  4 05:44:13 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Organization: The University of Birmingham, UK.
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Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 10:43:14 +0100
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On 3 Sep 2000, at 19:51, Claus Anders wrote:
> So I wonder, is there any coding scheme, which will
> produce such a low h2 and enlarge the average word length?

Yes, there are, although they may not be the methods used in the 
vms:

http://www2.micro-net.com/~ixohoxi/voy/ekt.txt
http://web.bham.ac.uk/G.Landini/evmt/daindaiin.htm

Note that the word and token length problem is as follows (to clarify, 
a "token" is any string separated by spaces, while a word is a type 
of token, regardless of its frequency).

Both, long tokens and long words are less frequent in the vms than 
in English or Latin. The word length distribution shows that the vms 
vocabulary is made of shorter words, but for the token length 
distribution (which shows somehow the use of the vocabulary), 
Latin and English show the maxima at slightly shorter token lengths 
than the vms.
This means that there is also a lack of short tokens in the vms text. I 
guess that this discrepancy is because high frequent words (in 
English: the, for, a,  of, and,  etc.) are very short while the most 
common in the vms: daiin, ol, aiin, chedy, shedy are (except ol) 
longer. 
Despite this observation, Zipf's length-frequency law also seems to 
be followed.
Even if one assumes that words may run together (like "thecat 
jumps on thetable")  there is still a shortage of long words. Note 
(Figs 17 & 18) in:

http://web.bham.ac.uk/G.Landini/evmt/zipf.htm

there are very few words (and tokens, obviously) longer than 10 
characters.
Of course, all this depends on what we call a character in the vms.

Cheers,

Gabriel




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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: low entropy text
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 13:19:32 +0200 
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Dear all,
today I tried to compute the entropy of a raeto romance example:
I got (with monkey):
h0: 4.32
h1: 3.93
h2: 2.69
Nearly as low, as VMS and even h1-h2 is in the same range.
Maybe the numbers are due of the low char count of my example.
If soemone has a larger text, I'd like to try this too.
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 Sep  4 09:53:21 2000
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Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2000 13:50:53 +0000
From: Rene Zandbergen <rene@voynich.nu>
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Claus Anders wrote:

> today I tried to compute the entropy of a raeto romance example:
> I got (with monkey):
> h0: 4.32
> h1: 3.93
> h2: 2.69
> Nearly as low, as VMS and even h1-h2 is in the same range.
> Maybe the numbers are due of the low char count of my example.

Actually, h1 is quite normal for a 20-character alphabet (as implied
by the h0). h2 is right in between Latin and Voynichese, and the
relatively low value could indeed be due to the shortness of the text
(the higher the order, the more the estimated entropy is reduced by
this). You can see some of that happening in the graphs of the
web article I mentioned yesterday.

Which brings me to the other thread: what we need is a word game
which both reduces entropy and word length, still keeping the
vocabulary size reasonable. That last feat may of course be
assisted by introducing spelling variations.

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep  4 10:52:25 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 15:49:58 +0100
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On 4 Sep 2000, at 13:50, Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> Which brings me to the other thread: what we need is a word game
> which both reduces entropy and word length, still keeping the
> vocabulary size reasonable. That last feat may of course be
> assisted by introducing spelling variations.

Unfortunately that alone would not do.
The daiin dialect does exactly that, even pushing entropy lower than 
the vms, yet I am not convinced that it is the right type of coding that 
would produce a vms-like text.

I think that the fact that the vms word structure seems very much 
constrained is very puzzling (Stolfi's OKOKOKO structure)

There are a few other things needing explanation as well. 

Why on earth <daiin> and <aiin> are so common and sometimes 
repeated or run together?

Why the <m>, <g>, <j> are so common at the end of lines and <q> 
at the start of words? 

Why are there sequences with characters that never appear in the 
entire text, and why some relatively common letters do not appear 
in those sequences?

I still think that we need to attack the labels. 

My candidate word is <kydain> in folio 2r for the plant name.
It appears twice in that page, as <kydainy> in the first line, and as 
<kydain> in the 2nd paragraph. It does not appear anywhere else in 
the ms. I think that Stolfi did some logical filtering for finding which 
words occur only in a single folio and nowhere else.

So let's assume that the "proper" Latin name of the plant is kydainy 
with let's say <y> standing for "us" (given that it is already used for 
marking the quire number) and the second <kydain> is the "normal 
name" in whatever tongue the author uses. 
At least in Spanish plants have sometimes names derived from 
Latin that which differ only in the termination like gladiolus (Latin) 
and gladiolo (Spanish).

Gabriel



From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep  5 22:27:55 2000
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From: Jim Gillogly <jim@acm.org>
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Subject: Re: Syntax and Semantics of the voynich text?
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Gold wrote:
> 
> So who has come up with an idea of the syntax and semantic
> structure of the voynich text?

Off the top of my head:  Newbold, Feely, Strong, Brumbaugh,
Levitov and Stojko.  I may be missing a couple.

-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	Mersday, 15 Halimath S.R. 2000, 02:26
	12.19.7.9.9, 11 Muluc 12 Mol, Ninth Lord of Night

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep  5 22:20:07 2000
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To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
From: Gold <gold@ij.net>
Subject: Syntax and Semantics of the voynich text?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0009010819280.15542-100000@diamond.ansuz.soo
 ke.bc.ca>
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So who has come up with an idea of the syntax and semantic
structure of the voynich text?

Just curious.

Turiyan

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep  8 17:45:04 2000
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Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2000 16:43:54 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> 
> Claus Anders wrote:
> 
> > today I tried to compute the entropy of a raeto romance example:
> > I got (with monkey):
> > h0: 4.32
> > h1: 3.93
> > h2: 2.69
> > Nearly as low, as VMS and even h1-h2 is in the same range.
> > Maybe the numbers are due of the low char count of my example.
> 
> Actually, h1 is quite normal for a 20-character alphabet (as implied
> by the h0). h2 is right in between Latin and Voynichese, and the
> relatively low value could indeed be due to the shortness of the text
> (the higher the order, the more the estimated entropy is reduced by
> this). You can see some of that happening in the graphs of the
> web article I mentioned yesterday.

	Twenty characters sounds low for a Romance language. 
Could it be due to a lossy spelling?

> Which brings me to the other thread: what we need is a word game
> which both reduces entropy and word length, still keeping the
> vocabulary size reasonable. That last feat may of course be
> assisted by introducing spelling variations.

	An EKT word game could do this.  (If you're not
familiar with that,see:

http://www2.micro-net.com/~ixohoxi/voy/ekt.txt

You could reduce word length by making the "word"
breaks syllable breaks.  EKT allows for variant
spellings/encipherments.

Dennis


> 
> Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  9 07:08:01 2000
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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
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Subject: Re: low entropy text
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    > [Dennis:] Twenty characters sounds low for a Romance language. 
    
Well, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese don't use "k", "y", "w" (except
for foreign names and derivatives), so the "official" alphabet has
only 23 letters. Moreover, Italian hardly ever uses "x" and "j",
uses "q" only in historical spellings, and is quite stingy on 
diacritics.

So a 20-letter "effective" alphabet for Rhaeto-Romance (whose spelling
is based on the Italian one) is not so out of range. (Assuming, of
course, that space and punctuation is not counted.)

    > Could it be due to a lossy spelling?
    
For Italian, it is partly a case of lossy spelling (no indication of
stress; no distinction between "open" and "closed" vowels, as in
"bello/nero", "sotto/notte"); and partly the use of digraphs for some
phonemes ("sci" for "sh", "gi" for "j", etc.).

All the best,

--stolfi

PS. I am going to be in Bristol, England for a conference next week,
and probably sightseeing in London and environs on friday-sunday. It
would be a pleasure to meet any British Voynichologists over lunch or
something.  (I plan to read my e-mail regularly during the conference.)

F'rinstance, it would be a chance to start paying that pizza bet,
which I am now afraid that I will eventually lose...

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  9 08:40:03 2000
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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: low entropy text
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    > [Brian Farnell:] Just an embryonic thought, I know it has been
    > suggested before, but I haven't yet seen some one suggest it
    > because of a mathematical reason. What about, rhyming, meter,
    > assonance, consonance and other poetry word games? Perhaps some
    > literary scholar out there has some suggested pieces of poetry
    > that have rigid styles but differ from one another. An analyses
    > of each one of them, compared to a standard prose text in the
    > same language might give us some ideas about what literary
    > devices do what to a natural language.

The VMs could be poetry or rhyming incantations, although the format
is a bit strange (many pages have only a single paragraph), and the
illustrations don't quite fit (most are plants or parts thereof).

Rhyming should decrease entropy only a little (basically a couple of
letters per line, or less). As for metrics, I don't know. A rigid
metric structure should make the text somewhat easier to predict, and
hence it should lower its entropy; but, on the other hand, it will
force the poet to use less common words and phrases, so the entropy
may increase.

The preface to Cervantes's "Don Quixote" (1605) contains many short
poems and dedications from legendary knights and other fictional
characters, obviously by the author himself. Some of them have
all the rhyming syllables omitted, and yet they are still readable:

  AL LIBRO DE DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA

  URGANDA LA DESCONOCIDA       

    Si de llegarte a los bue-,       
  libro, fueres con letu-,           
  no te dir el boquirru-            
  que no pones bien los de-.         
  Mas si el pan no se te cue-        
  por ir a manos de idio-,           
  vers, de manos a bo-,             
  an no dar una en el cla-;         
  [...]
    Advierte que es desati-,         
  siendo de vidrio el teja-,         
  tomar piedras en las ma-           
  para tirar al veci-.               
  Deja que el hombre de jui-         
  en las obras que compo-            
  se vaya con pies de plo-;          
  que el que saca a luz pape-        
  para entretener donce-,            
  escribe a tontas y a lo-.          

All the best,

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  9 11:31:54 2000
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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
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Subject: Re: Trithemius progressive cipher
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    > [Claus Anders:] [Trithemius progressive cipher] has some
    > interesting features (Garbriel Landini poited to this too) 
    > 2. The word structure will be preserved

I don't know what you mean here.

Consider for example the core-mantle-crust model described in my
Voynich page. Since the components of that model have varying lengths,
any component after the first one would be encoded with different
shifts in different words. This variation should prevent us from
seeing any structure. Thus I think that the progressive cipher is
pretty much ruled out.

    > 3. This cipher will not change the entropy of the text.

Indeed, in theory --- since the original can be recovered without loss.

However, the probability distribution of the letters will become
flatter, since the same plain letter will be mapped to several
different cipher letters, depending on its position in the word.
Therefore, the single character entropy will increase.

This observation applies also to the k-letter entropies.

Indeed, almost any mechanical cipher other than plain Caesar will
increase the computed value of h_k.  

    > So, if (and why not) our author of VMS used a cipher like this,
    > how did he produce a code with such low h2 entropy?

The statistics h_k can be manipulated in infinitely many ways. One way
of lowering h_2 is to insert after each plaintext letter x_i a null
letter y_i = f(x_i) where f is a fixed function. This "encoding" will
set h2 to half of the original h1. If f is chosen so that Prob(f(x_i))
is close to Prob(x_i), then h1 itself won't change much.


But I would say that no theory (criptological or linguistic) for the
VMs is worth spending any time on, unless it can explain (a) the
compact word-length distribution, (b) the core-mantle-crust structure,
and (c) the gallows-bit correlation.

All the best,

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  9 12:52:21 2000
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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
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    > I am very much interested in making a substantial contribution
    > to the project timewise. 
    
I think the most urgent thing to study is the gallows bit correlation.
(Map each word to the number of gallows letters it contains, then
study the statistics of the resulting digit string.)

As you must all be aware of by now, the result consists of 0's and 1's
almost exclusively, and there are surprisingly long runs of 1's and
0's. This correlation between successive words severely constrains the
VMs theories, crypto or otherwise.

Some questions that occur to me:

  What is the distribution of the lengths of the runs?
  
  Are the statistics similar in both "languages"? In all sections?
  
  Do the line/paragraph/page breaks affect the run-length statistics?
  
I should have been doing these statistics myself, but I have been
busy with useless work (meaning the stuff I am paid to do).
Perhaps in a few months...

    > One big limitation I have right now, is that I no longer have
    > access to a Sun, and I haven't taken the time to get really
    > familiar with my PC clone, it's mainly a toy to write e-mail,
    > pirate music and play on Chinese web sites.  Is there anyway to
    > run all of those neat little grep and cat routines on this
    > machine without having to shell out some big bucks to buy a
    > language?

It is possible to install both Windows and Linux on the same PC, so
that you can switch between them at boot time. I haven't done it
myself (I use a Sun workstation), but the PCs in our student labs are
configured that way, and som are many of our faculty machines.

All the best,

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  9 21:06:49 2000
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Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2000 20:05:51 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> 
>     > [Dennis:] Twenty characters sounds low for a Romance language.
> 
> Well, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese don't use "k", "y", "w" (except
> for foreign names and derivatives), so the "official" alphabet has
> only 23 letters. Moreover, Italian hardly ever uses "x" and "j",
> uses "q" only in historical spellings, and is quite stingy on
> diacritics.
> 
> So a 20-letter "effective" alphabet for Rhaeto-Romance (whose spelling
> is based on the Italian one) is not so out of range. (Assuming, of
> course, that space and punctuation is not counted.)

	Quite so.  I think that the Romance languages actually
have fewer vowel phonemes than the Germanic ones.  I
believe that Italian and Spanish only have the five
Latin vowels (but you mention open and closed vowels
for Italian) and do not have the distinction of vowel
length that Latin had.  French has more, about nine. 
By contrast, English has about 11, German has 14, Dutch
probably the same as German, etc.  The Romance
languages look vowel-rich because they don't have the
consonant clusters of German etc.  (I was thinking
about all this in working on Hamptonese.  Hamptonese
seems to have ~11 vowels and ~23 consonants.  So it's
probably phonetic English.)

> 
>     > Could it be due to a lossy spelling?
> 
> For Italian, it is partly a case of lossy spelling (no indication of
> stress; no distinction between "open" and "closed" vowels, as in
> "bello/nero", "sotto/notte"); and partly the use of digraphs for some
> phonemes ("sci" for "sh", "gi" for "j", etc.).

	This isn't terribly lossy.  English orthography is far
worse, in every respect.
 
> F'rinstance, it would be a chance to start paying that pizza bet,
> which I am now afraid that I will eventually lose...

	I don't know about that.  I'm starting to incline
towards Chinese, although I'll check out my medieval
French hypothesis as soon as I can.

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  9 21:13:57 2000
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Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2000 20:13:39 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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To: Mark Perakh <perakh@nctimes.net>
Cc: Jason Morningstar <mornj@ils.unc.edu>, voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
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Mark Perakh wrote:
> 
> 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.

	Negotiations with Yale for an almost direct
publication by them fell apart.  Our best hope for a
high-quality color VMs publication remains Octavo 

www.octavo.com

	I'll send them an e-mail to see where they stand.

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  9 21:41:35 2000
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Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2000 20:41:13 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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To: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
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Subject: Re: Voynich research needs
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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Jacques Guy wrote:
> 
> 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 seems to me that there ought to be.  The continuum
might be:

glossalalia -             semantically empty, except
for expressing an ecstatic state of consciousness
pidgin languages -        has meaning, but cannot
express very elaborate ideas.
early creoles -           much more meaning and
expressive power.  Only needs an established
oral/written                                 tradition
to have the semantic power of full natural languages
full natural languages -  French, Chinese, Russian,
Hungarian, etc.  Includes late creoles; English is 
	                     probably a very late creole.

> It could be a hoax, and still
> be meaningful -- like Helen Smith's "Martian" 

	Helene Smith's "Martian" is not a hoax but a very
special case. She produced it under hypnosis, without
conscious volition.  It's rather like past-life
memories or alien abduction memories.  (I believe that
Kelley's Enochian is another example of this.)  Her
"Martian" is certainly an early creole, and probably a
late creole; it would have most of the expressive power
of French.

> 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:

	I think we've proven quite sufficiently that the low
entropy is due to the heavily paradigmatic structure of
Voynichese words.  In my view, the low entropy is now a
nonissue.  For the newcomers, read my paper:

Understanding the Second-Order Entropies of Voynich
Text
http://www2.micro-net.com/~ixohoxi/voy/mbpaper.htm

	D'Imperio's book gives Tiltman's paradigm for Voynich
words; his paradigm accounts for perhaps 60% of Voynich
words.

Robert Firth's Voynichese paradigm accounts for about
80%:
http://www.research.att.com/~reeds/voynich/firth/24.txt

and Stolfi's latest paradigm accounts for nearly all:
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/00-06-07-word-grammar/

> 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.

	To amplify my comment above, a verbose cipher, one
that probably substitutes several Voynich letters for a
single phoneme.  But definitely not a cipher in the
usual sense of the term.

> 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

	I can't reach the link at the moment.  I thought that
you (Frogguy) had decided that the Codex Seraphinianus
had more characters than an alphabet or syllabary.  Is
it then a morphographic system, like Chinese?

> 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).

	I agree.  That's a selling point for our efforts, in
any case!  Could we get SETI funding?  ;-)

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep  9 22:03:46 2000
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To: Brian Moroz <bmoroz@rocketmail.com>
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Subject: Re: Voynich research needs (automatic writing)
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Brian Moroz wrote:
> 
> -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.

	I'm puzzled here on what "automatic writing" is.  Such
writings as Edgar Cayce's prophesies, the Course in
Miracles, OAHSPE (a 19th century book supposedly
channeled from extraterrestrials), and others are
perfectly good natural language, English, even though
they were produced in a trance state.  So they're as
straightforward to read as the newspaper.  Could
someone clarify all this?

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep 11 00:10:27 2000
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Jacques Guy wrote:

> Here, listen to me: the VMS is a treatise of Necromancy.
> Proof: I deciphered it and used the knowledge to summon
> the spirit of Romaine Newbold. He proceeded to prove his
> decipherment by calling the spirit of Roger Bacon, who
> confirmed that indeed, he, Bacon, was the author. Alas,
> I cannot tell you more as there is a curse on the VMS
> which renders insane whoever shares his decipherment
> with anyone else. Like Newbold tried to do. So he
> went insane less than half-way through explaining his
> decipherment. Which again proves my point.

I personally believe the VMS is a relic from the future in an
alien language, left as an aid to prepare us for first contact. 
BTW, I successfully deciphered part of the first page, it reads
"To serve man".  Evidently these beings are of a good sort, full
of philanthropic urges.  The future looks bright.
Regards,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Sep 10 00:34:19 2000
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To: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
Cc: stolfi@ic.unicamp.br, VOYNICH-L <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Re: low entropy text
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On Sat, 9 Sep 2000, Dennis wrote:
> > "bello/nero", "sotto/notte"); and partly the use of digraphs for some
> > phonemes ("sci" for "sh", "gi" for "j", etc.).
> 
> 	This isn't terribly lossy.  English orthography is far
> worse, in every respect.

But in English there are often many ways to spell the same sound, and I
think that would tend to drive the entropy up.  For low entropy, it should
be lossy but *consistent*.

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

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References: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0008231441310.19935-100000@ruby.ils.unc.edu> <39A53F72.5E52E441@nctimes.net> <39BAE043.B075DC6F@micro-net.com>
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Dennis wrote:

>         Negotiations with Yale for an almost direct
> publication by them fell apart.  Our best hope for a
> high-quality color VMs publication remains Octavo

While it is true that there was a major setback, the
prospects for obtaining a high-quality colour reproduction
via a specialist who collaborates with the Beinecke
are still good. Please nobody undertake any independent
negotiations without first checking with Jim Reeds.

Best wishes,
        Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Sep 10 21:18:09 2000
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Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 20:17:35 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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To: Gold <gold@ij.net>
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Subject: Re: Syntax and Semantics of the voynich text?
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	Not a lot has been done about syntax.  Jacques
developed Son of Glotto or FQ,a tool for studying
syntax.  It produces a listing of the words that appear
1,2,3, etc. words away from a given word.  You can get
it at:
http://web.bham.ac.uk/G.Landini/evmt/evmt.htm

However, I am not aware of anyone working on syntax.

	Very little has been done on semantics.  A year or two
ago we tried assigning meanings to a few words.  That
didn't go anywhere.  

Dennis


Gold wrote:
> 
> So who has come up with an idea of the syntax and semantic
> structure of the voynich text?
> 
> Just curious.
> 
> Turiyan

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Sep 10 21:41:40 2000
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From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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	I found the following site on claims of decipherment
of the Phaistos Disk:

Phaistos Disk Decipherment Update
http://users.otenet.gr/~svoronan/phaistos.htm

	While some of it is good research and our list member
Jacques Guy has a couple of pointers, the biggest part
is crankery.  Our old friend Steven Fischer's book,
*Glyphbreaker*, takes the prize.  "Recently he
published the book Glyphbreaker that includes the story
of the Phaistos Disk together with his newer efforts in
deciphering Rongorongo...  Dr. Fischer published his
original findings in the book "Evidence of Hellenic
Dialect in the Phaistos Disk", 1988."  Hmmm... wonder
where he got that title???  A reviewer on Amazon, Paul
Bahn, says "The most impressive aspect of Glyphbreaker
is not so much that this remarkable man has cracked two
entirely different scripts, a feat unique in the
history of epigraphy, but rather that he has done so
despite tremendous privations in his life.... "  So
Fischer is a poor, toiling, heroic inventor as well!!!  

	Fortunately, there is at least one sober review on
Amazon:

"Interesting but utterly unconvincing, June 21, 2000  
Reviewer: Paul V Caetano from Ottawa, Canada. Fischer
claims to have deciphered two of the remaining
undeciphered ancient scripts. However, while he might
have sacrificed a lot in his efforts, the results are
not convincing. The Phaistos disk has been the subject
of many decipherment attempts. The Phaistos disk
homepage alone lists 39 such endeavors. Fischer's
methods are more scientific than most of the others,
but ultimately not much more persuasive. The glaring
flaw in his method is that he does not have enough
checks to eliminate bad assumptions. With a text as
short as the Phaistos Disk, if you make enough
assumptions you can get a legible text in whatever
language you want. That is exactly what is  presented
in Glyphbreaker. Fischer has studied the Easter Island
script extensively, and thus brings a wealth of
knowledge to his discussion of that script. However,
his proposal is certainly not a true decipherment and
the jury remains out on its validity."

	"With a text as short as the Phaistos Disk, if you
make enough assumptions you can get a legible text in
whatever language you want."  Ah, how familiar we are
with this!

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Sep 10 22:21:42 2000
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Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 02:23:14 +0000
From: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
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I see that Dennis has been ferretting about the Net
again:

> Phaistos Disk Decipherment Update
> http://users.otenet.gr/~svoronan/phaistos.htm
> 
>         While some of it is good research and our list member
> Jacques Guy has a couple of pointers, the biggest part
> is crankery.

And what crankery! Wonderful, super duper crankery most of
it. 


> Our old friend Steven Fischer's book,
> *Glyphbreaker*, takes the prize.

Which is wittily reviewed at link (40):

http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~lipi/archaeology/phaistos.html


>  A reviewer on Amazon, Paul
> Bahn

Bahn, in New Scientist two years ago, described the Phaistos
disk as a "large, carved stone disk". It would be hard to
get it more wrong! So I do not think we should be bitching
about Fortean Times on the VMS. At least FT got fewer than
three main points out of four hopeless wrong. Perhaps I 
should offer New Scientist my own view of the Phaistos disk,
that large, carved stone _pyramid_... BTW, I have a copy
of the correspondence between John Chadwick and the editor
of National Geographic, who wanted to publish Fischer's
decipherment of the disk in NG. It makes for jaw-dropping
reading. Eventually, after a leeeeengthy argument Chadwick
managed to convince Nat.Geo. I admire Chadwick's patience.

Here, listen to me: the VMS is a treatise of Necromancy. 
Proof: I deciphered it and used the knowledge to summon
the spirit of Romaine Newbold. He proceeded to prove his
decipherment by calling the spirit of Roger Bacon, who
confirmed that indeed, he, Bacon, was the author. Alas,
I cannot tell you more as there is a curse on the VMS
which renders insane whoever shares his decipherment
with anyone else. Like Newbold tried to do. So he
went insane less than half-way through explaining his
decipherment. Which again proves my point. 

Hey, is anyone at National Geographic reading this?
Have no fear: John Chadwick is no longer here to
talk you out of publishing my momentous discovery!
I'm open to offers!

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 12 01:45:28 2000
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References: <39BC37FF.34006AD6@micro-net.com> <39BC4212.A520F4ED@alphalink.com.au> <39BB0975.FA09434B@gte.net> <39BE4006.240EB5A4@mail.msen.com>
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Bruce Grant wrote:

> If we could arrange to have the VMS transmitted convincingly from space,
> we could enlist the help of a whole new set of players, the SETI
> community! Anybody got any pals at NASA?
> 
> Bruce

An odd thgought that springs from this that may actually be of
real use for the VMS.  Those SETI guys crunch an awful lot of
data.  I know it's of a very different nature, but I wonder if
their methods have any application?  They basically are looking
for set patterns not caused by natural phenomena in a sea of
noise with little preset notions as to what they are looking
for.  Perhaps it might lend itself to picking out oddities and
identifying patterns...Anyone know more about the subject?  If
those methods are of any use, we could synthesize the text into
a sound file and feed it through the programs they already
have.  Since it would be an intelligent signal, you would have
to somehow change the tolerances on what the program wants to
call intelligent, but I assume with that much data to work on,
their software already does this in a multiple tiered 'weeding
out' process.  They might even have software built up in reserve
for 'the big day'.  It's a longshot, but who knows, they might
be able with a few keystrokes to produce a hundred variants on
every type of analyses done so far as well as quite a few not
thought of yet.  Anyone know anybody in SETI?  On a similar
note, what other existing forms of sophisticated data analyses
are out there?  Maybe instead of modifying existing techniques
we could just translate the text into different forms?  I
believe some work has been done in computer analyses of the
musical styles of various composers, for one example.  Sounds
crazy, but at least it's a different approach.
Regards,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 12 02:52:11 2000
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Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 23:52:22 -0700
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From: jporter@ricochet.net (Julie Porter)
Subject: Re: OT - Enough to Gag a Maggot
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>Bruce Grant wrote:
>
>> If we could arrange to have the VMS transmitted convincingly from space,
>> we could enlist the help of a whole new set of players, the SETI
>> community! Anybody got any pals at NASA?
>>
>> Bruce
>
>An odd thgought that springs from this that may actually be of
>real use for the VMS.  Those SETI guys crunch an awful lot of
>data.  I know it's of a very different nature, but I wonder if
>their methods have any application?  They basically are looking
>for set patterns not caused by natural phenomena in a sea of
>noise with little preset notions as to what they are looking
>for.  Perhaps it might lend itself to picking out oddities and
>identifying patterns...Anyone know more about the subject?  If
>those methods are of any use, we could synthesize the text into
>a sound file and feed it through the programs they already
>have.  Since it would be an intelligent signal, you would have
>to somehow change the tolerances on what the program wants to
>call intelligent, but I assume with that much data to work on,
>their software already does this in a multiple tiered 'weeding
>out' process.  They might even have software built up in reserve
>for 'the big day'.  It's a longshot, but who knows, they might
>be able with a few keystrokes to produce a hundred variants on
>every type of analyses done so far as well as quite a few not
>thought of yet.  Anyone know anybody in SETI?  On a similar
>note, what other existing forms of sophisticated data analyses
>are out there?  Maybe instead of modifying existing techniques
>we could just translate the text into different forms?  I
>believe some work has been done in computer analyses of the
>musical styles of various composers, for one example.  Sounds
>crazy, but at least it's a different approach.
>Regards,
>Brian
A number of my friends who are in amateur rocketry run the seti programs in
their spare time. I think there might be something on www.erps.org. Look
for something called seti@home.
I do know a number of folk who are part of the SETI efforts. The problem is
that I usually only see them intermittenlty. This next time will be at the
end of May as the convention usually held over thanksgiving is not
happening this year.
There is a diffrent convention called CONTACT. I know several people who
are active with that. I am not sure when the next one is. If we have a
liason who is elequent and could write up exactly what is desired I can
forward that. Perhaps they could put it on a panel.

I have mentioned the VMS in passing to these folks. If some of the people
on this list were interested in attending BAYCON here in the silicon
valley. www.baycon.org I *might* be able to get them onto a panel where
this could be disussed. This would be next May on the memorial day weekend.
The SETI panels are quite popular I have even been on several myself.
I know there have been VMS meetings in europe. Perhaps there should be one
here in high tech centeral. BAYCON would be a really good venue. These
conventions are held all over the world. Look for a science fiction
LITERARY convention rather than a media convention. BAYCON is regional
however the World scence fiction convention comes to San Jose in 2002. (I
think the page is www.conjose.org) I would highly encourage anyone on this
list to make plans to attend now.

Right now I have my hands full with several mecanical music/Autamata
projects. I have a problem with trying to invert? a 4x4 matrix to find the
inverse of a projection matrix. I need a simple algoritim preferably to
handle nxn matrixies. Never thought to ask this group.
The actual problem is to locate epipoler lines in N images. There are a
number of papers to this effect. The math is a bit beyond me and the people
with the code are selfish and will not share it.

The problem of Photogramertry is not unlike these other problems SETI and
the VMS. It is easy to map 3d points to 2d space. Taking two (or more)
images and recovering 3d world corrdinates is diffucalt. Yet Humans (and it
s beleved many animals) do this naturally.
Another problem I recently ran into is in music to take a analog recording
(*.wav) and convert it to a MIDI file, recording the keys and timings of
the instrument played. A person with a trained ear can do this without
thinking.

I think it would be amusing if there was one simple soloution for all of
the above :-)

My favorite SETI quote:
'If you want to know how to talk to alien life forms, step outside and
learn to talk to plants first.'
-julieP


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Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 23:52:22 -0700
To: voynich@rand.org
From: jporter@ricochet.net (Julie Porter)
Subject: Re: OT - Enough to Gag a Maggot
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>Bruce Grant wrote:
>
>> If we could arrange to have the VMS transmitted convincingly from space,
>> we could enlist the help of a whole new set of players, the SETI
>> community! Anybody got any pals at NASA?
>>
>> Bruce
>
>An odd thgought that springs from this that may actually be of
>real use for the VMS.  Those SETI guys crunch an awful lot of
>data.  I know it's of a very different nature, but I wonder if
>their methods have any application?  They basically are looking
>for set patterns not caused by natural phenomena in a sea of
>noise with little preset notions as to what they are looking
>for.  Perhaps it might lend itself to picking out oddities and
>identifying patterns...Anyone know more about the subject?  If
>those methods are of any use, we could synthesize the text into
>a sound file and feed it through the programs they already
>have.  Since it would be an intelligent signal, you would have
>to somehow change the tolerances on what the program wants to
>call intelligent, but I assume with that much data to work on,
>their software already does this in a multiple tiered 'weeding
>out' process.  They might even have software built up in reserve
>for 'the big day'.  It's a longshot, but who knows, they might
>be able with a few keystrokes to produce a hundred variants on
>every type of analyses done so far as well as quite a few not
>thought of yet.  Anyone know anybody in SETI?  On a similar
>note, what other existing forms of sophisticated data analyses
>are out there?  Maybe instead of modifying existing techniques
>we could just translate the text into different forms?  I
>believe some work has been done in computer analyses of the
>musical styles of various composers, for one example.  Sounds
>crazy, but at least it's a different approach.
>Regards,
>Brian
A number of my friends who are in amateur rocketry run the seti programs in
their spare time. I think there might be something on www.erps.org. Look
for something called seti@home.
I do know a number of folk who are part of the SETI efforts. The problem is
that I usually only see them intermittenlty. This next time will be at the
end of May as the convention usually held over thanksgiving is not
happening this year.
There is a diffrent convention called CONTACT. I know several people who
are active with that. I am not sure when the next one is. If we have a
liason who is elequent and could write up exactly what is desired I can
forward that. Perhaps they could put it on a panel.

I have mentioned the VMS in passing to these folks. If some of the people
on this list were interested in attending BAYCON here in the silicon
valley. www.baycon.org I *might* be able to get them onto a panel where
this could be disussed. This would be next May on the memorial day weekend.
The SETI panels are quite popular I have even been on several myself.
I know there have been VMS meetings in europe. Perhaps there should be one
here in high tech centeral. BAYCON would be a really good venue. These
conventions are held all over the world. Look for a science fiction
LITERARY convention rather than a media convention. BAYCON is regional
however the World scence fiction convention comes to San Jose in 2002. (I
think the page is www.conjose.org) I would highly encourage anyone on this
list to make plans to attend now.

Right now I have my hands full with several mecanical music/Autamata
projects. I have a problem with trying to invert? a 4x4 matrix to find the
inverse of a projection matrix. I need a simple algoritim preferably to
handle nxn matrixies. Never thought to ask this group.
The actual problem is to locate epipoler lines in N images. There are a
number of papers to this effect. The math is a bit beyond me and the people
with the code are selfish and will not share it.

The problem of Photogramertry is not unlike these other problems SETI and
the VMS. It is easy to map 3d points to 2d space. Taking two (or more)
images and recovering 3d world corrdinates is diffucalt. Yet Humans (and it
s beleved many animals) do this naturally.
Another problem I recently ran into is in music to take a analog recording
(*.wav) and convert it to a MIDI file, recording the keys and timings of
the instrument played. A person with a trained ear can do this without
thinking.

I think it would be amusing if there was one simple soloution for all of
the above :-)

My favorite SETI quote:
'If you want to know how to talk to alien life forms, step outside and
learn to talk to plants first.'
-julieP


From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 12 03:10:31 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'Brian Eric Farnell'" <bfarnell@gte.net>
Cc: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: AW: OT - Enough to Gag a Maggot
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 09:09:56 +0200
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[Anders, Claus]  Hi Brian,
I once tried to convert the VMS into a soundfile and it was complete noise
(flat distributed spectrum).Only with inserted line breaks I got some peaks
at 2700 and 3700 Hz wich is due to frequency of lines. If we want to convert
the VMS into sound we have to choose how to project the Voinichese character
into samples, jsut using ASCII, FROGGUY or EVA is to no avail (just noise,
no patterns). Maybe we can use a note per char and listen to the melody ;-)
Claus 

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 12 05:49:39 2000
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From: Adams Douglas <adamsd@cts.com>
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Subject: Re: OT - Enough to Gag a Maggot
To: bfarnell@gte.net (Brian Eric Farnell)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 02:49:23 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: voynich@rand.org (Voynich List)
In-Reply-To: <39BC7147.D13A3E0E@gte.net> from "Brian Eric Farnell" at Sep 10, 2000 07:44:39 PM
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Brian Eric Farnell wrote:
> 
> 
> An odd thgought that springs from this that may actually be of
> real use for the VMS.  Those SETI guys crunch an awful lot of
> data.  I know it's of a very different nature, but I wonder if
> their methods have any application?  They basically are looking
> for set patterns not caused by natural phenomena in a sea of
> noise with little preset notions as to what they are looking
> for.  Perhaps it might lend itself to picking out oddities and
> identifying patterns...Anyone know more about the subject?  

SETI searches attempt to detect narrowband signals that do not show thermal
or other frequency spreading characteristics. Very little is searched for
in terms of signal content. Just about all naturally produced signals have
a large bandwidth. We already know the VMs was created by intelligent
beings, so we're way past what SETI searches look for.

-Adams
 (formerly at NASA, JPL Deep Space Network)

-- 
====================================================
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 Sep 12 09:30:16 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Gallow-Bit counting
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 15:29:32 +0200
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Dear all,
today I computed the run length of Gallows in the VMS (EVA) and got these
results:
Run length for 0 Gallows in sequence:

run length/line length [%]	#lines/# lines in VMS [%]
-----------------------------------------------------
100							3.0943033
 80							0.3192533
 75							0.4666013
 67							0.7121813
 60							0.5648333
 50							2.9223973
 40							1.5717093
 33							2.9960713
 29							0.2946953
 25							3.6836943
 22							0.1719063
 20							3.8310413
 17							1.9891943
 14							1.9646373
 13							1.6208253
 11							2.1856583
 10							1.2033403
  9							0.3929273
  0							6.2377213

Run length for 1 or more  Gallows in sequence:

run length/line length [%]	#lines/# lines in VMS [%]
------------------------------------------------------
100					6.2377213
 91					0.2455803
 90					0.3683693
 89					0.5157173
 88					0.3929273
 86					0.5893913
 83					0.4420433
 82					0.1473483
 80					1.2278983
 78					0.7612973
 75					1.9155213
 71					0.4911593
 67					2.2347743
 63					0.2946953
 60					1.7190573
 57					0.6385073
 56					0.3929273
 50					4.5186643
 44					0.1964643
 43					0.5402753
 40					2.7259333
 38					0.3683693
 33					2.7013753
 25					1.9646373
 20					1.2770143
 17					0.2210223
  0					3.0943033
This means:
lines with every word including at least 1 Gallow (=100% coverage) occur at
6.23% of all lines and a coverage of 50% occur at 4.51%. Similar numbers for
no Gallows in sequence.
(lines with occurences < 0.1% are not used in the calculations)
So about 25 % of all lines have a 50% coverage of gallows and about 9% of
all lines have 50% no gallows in sequence.
Cheers
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 Sep 11 22:37:00 2000
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Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 10:39:03 -0400
From: Bruce Grant <bgrant@mail.msen.com>
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Brian Eric Farnell wrote:

> I personally believe the VMS is a relic from the future in an
> alien language, left as an aid to prepare us for first contact.
> BTW, I successfully deciphered part of the first page, it reads
> "To serve man".  Evidently these beings are of a good sort, full
> of philanthropic urges.  The future looks bright.
> Regards,
> Brian

If we could arrange to have the VMS transmitted convincingly from space,
we could enlist the help of a whole new set of players, the SETI
community! Anybody got any pals at NASA?

Bruce

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 12 11:19:03 2000
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From: "R. Brzustowicz" <brz@u.washington.edu>
To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Re: OT - Enough to Gag a Maggot
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> Bruce Grant wrote:
> 
> > If we could arrange to have the VMS transmitted convincingly from space,
> > we could enlist the help of a whole new set of players, the SETI
> > community! Anybody got any pals at NASA?
> > 
> > Bruce
> 
> An odd thgought that springs from this that may actually be of
> real use for the VMS.  Those SETI guys crunch an awful lot of
> data.  I know it's of a very different nature, but I wonder if
> their methods have any application? 

Voynich at Home?  Maybe there's some way to adapt the SETI
screen-saver?

Richard B

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 12 19:34:33 2000
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Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 16:31:52 -0700
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Hi folks,

I'm brand new to the list, and therefore I thought it would be appropriate 
me to throw in an ill-informed and un-asked-for opinion. :)

Richard B wrote:
 > Voynich at Home?  Maybe there's some way to adapt the SETI
 > screen-saver?

Ignoring for the moment the fact that at least 20 people would actually
participate, I think it's unlikely to be fruitful, since generally these 
types of
distributed computing systems (SETI at Home, distributed.net) always have a 
known brute-force approach to cracking their particular nut.

I think we need more (human-generated) "Aha!" type experiences, followed by 
modest computation, rather than a massive brute force approach.  My Ahas,
incidentally, usually occur in the shower.  How about Voynich-in-shower?

- Jim

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 14 03:49:00 2000
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Claus Anders wrote:
> Today I had the idea to make a bitmap of the VMS:
> 1. For every char in VMS I compute the frequncy and assign a color to the
> char depending on frequency: from red (low frequncy) to blue (high
> frequency). Than map every page to this colouring scheme using e.g a 10
> pages by 10 pages grid. For the whole VMS I will get around 2 Bitmaps. Myabe
> the image could reveal some structure (Courier A and B or something like
> that).
> 2. Then do the same for char pairs or triplets
> 3. At last the same for tokens
> Do you think this is futile?
> Cheers
> Claus
I like it, this is sort of what I have been thinking about with
music, though it looks like similar things have been done
before.  I was thinking about assigning each letter a value and
then drawing the curve between the values so that while still
keeping to two dimensions, you can show letter, word position
and have some data regarding relationships between letters.  I
was still trying to find a meaningful way to assign the values,
some method reproduceable with any piece of known or unknown
text. Beyond this, we looked at alot of ideas with gallows bits
as being a quality, rather than a  single letter.  This could
also be played with in the same sort of graph, using the gallows
as different wave forms on the same frequencies. 
Regards,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 14 05:40:35 2000
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Gabriel Landini wrote:
> If one is interested in the correlation between symbols, then
> assigning numerical values to the symbols of a symbolic sequence
> introduces bias in the new sequence. This has been done in the
> past with DNA sequences and it has been heavily criticised in the
> literature.
> The characteristics of the newly made numerical sequence will vary
> with the selection of the numbers you assign to each symbol.

You are exactly right, that's where I am stuck at.  If the
values were assigned in a meaningful way, it might not be so. 
Alternately, if they were assigned values according to some
formula based on frequency for example, they would have meaning
when compared with other texts prepared the same way.  The way
I'd like to see it would be that charcters with the least
correlation had the largest amplitude difference and the
characters with the most had the smallest.  This might help in
developing a more thorough mathematical fingerprint of a
language's written system.  I'm becoming increasingly aware of
the difference between a natural language and it's written
expression.  As a language geek, I'm very intrigued with the
work the group has done and I think that alot of understanding
about written systems and languages will come out of this work. 
I agree there is a danger of introducing bogons into the data,
but if we could do it without bogons we might be intrigued by
what we find.  Unfortuneately, we may not be able to understand
what we find when we see it without tons of research on other
languages.  One thing I think might come out of the method I
proposed would be a way to identify foreign words, or perhaps a
mathematical measure of foreign influences on the language. More
later.
Regards,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 13 08:40:07 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Latin abbreviations (in VMS?)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 14:37:39 +0200
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Dear all,
I'm just wading through the past mailing lists and stumbled over some latin
abbreviations vs. VMS cipher.
Does anybody know of an online resource to a list of such latin abbr. ?
(I found a program acting as a dictionary, but it will cost 48 EUR, to much
for just curious evaluation).
Thanx
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 Sep 13 12:29:30 2000
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Hello, do you know where can i find statistics for word frecuencies in serveral
lenguajes?

Thanks

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 13 12:32:31 2000
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From: Claus_Anders@t-online.de (Claus Anders)
To: <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Cc: <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: AW: Counting the Gallow Bits
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 18:32:23 +0200
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I did this, but the resulting numbers where quite similar only differing in
the 1st decimal.
This behaviour I have anticipated ,because in lines shorter than 7 tokens
the distribution ist a good mixture of 01 sequences (in fact all numbers
from 0x00 to 0xff exist, but some are of cource more frequent). But in
longer lines the tendency to clustering of 0 or 1 becomes significant.

Today I had the idea to make a bitmap of the VMS:
1. For every char in VMS I compute the frequncy and assign a color to the
char depending on frequency: from red (low frequncy) to blue (high
frequency). Than map every page to this colouring scheme using e.g a 10
pages by 10 pages grid. For the whole VMS I will get around 2 Bitmaps. Myabe
the image could reveal some structure (Courier A and B or something like
that).
2. Then do the same for char pairs or triplets
3. At last the same for tokens
Do you think this is futile?
Cheers
Claus
-----Ursprungliche Nachricht-----
Von: Gabriel Landini [mailto:G.Landini@bham.ac.uk]
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 13. September 2000 09:58
An: Claus Anders
Betreff: Re: Counting the Gallow Bits


On 12 Sep 2000, at 20:18, Claus Anders wrote:
> yes I counted the labels too, but they're even long lines (11 tokens
> or less) with 100% 1 coverage.


Well, those statistics will mix the rules of word construction with
those of grammar.
I would count only those in text lines but not labels since a sequence
of labels may not have any grammatical structure.

Cheers,

Gabriel


From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 13 20:19:19 2000
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Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 19:19:02 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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Subject: Re: AW: Counting the Gallow Bits
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	By all means try it! Other list members have done
similar things.  Rene used a 
color map to find possible clusters of A and B pages:

http://web.bham.ac.uk/G.Landini/evmt/lang.htm

and Stolfi colored letters to indicate character
entropy (can't reach his server but here's his VMs
page:

http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/

Dennis

Claus Anders wrote:
> 
> Today I had the idea to make a bitmap of the VMS:
> 1. For every char in VMS I compute the frequncy and assign a color to the
> char depending on frequency: from red (low frequncy) to blue (high
> frequency). Than map every page to this colouring scheme using e.g a 10
> pages by 10 pages grid. For the whole VMS I will get around 2 Bitmaps. Myabe
> the image could reveal some structure (Courier A and B or something like
> that).
> 2. Then do the same for char pairs or triplets
> 3. At last the same for tokens
> Do you think this is futile?
> Cheers
> Claus
> -----Ursprungliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Gabriel Landini [mailto:G.Landini@bham.ac.uk]
> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 13. September 2000 09:58
> An: Claus Anders
> Betreff: Re: Counting the Gallow Bits
> 
> On 12 Sep 2000, at 20:18, Claus Anders wrote:
> > yes I counted the labels too, but they're even long lines (11 tokens
> > or less) with 100% 1 coverage.
> 
> Well, those statistics will mix the rules of word construction with
> those of grammar.
> I would count only those in text lines but not labels since a sequence
> of labels may not have any grammatical structure.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Gabriel

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 14 01:10:51 2000
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Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 22:10:19 -0700
To: voynich@rand.org
From: jporter@ricochet.net (Julie Porter)
Subject: Re: OT - Enough to Gag a Maggot
Sender: jim@mail.rand.org
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>On 11 Sep 2000, at 23:52, Julie Porter wrote:
>> Another
>> problem I recently ran into is in music to take a analog recording
>> (*.wav) and convert it to a MIDI file, recording the keys and timings
>> of the instrument played. A person with a trained ear can do this
>> without thinking.
>
>Hi Julie,
>It is  not easy to transform a sound to MIDI unless it is a
>monophonic source. I know that there are a couple of programs
>claiming to do that, but I was told that none works very well.
>The problem is that while the wav is the sound data, the MIDI format
>is just the "note" data. The transformation programmes usually work
>by Fourier Transforming the data and looking at the peaks in the
>spectrum (those should be the fundamental) but as you can
>imagine, different instruments have different spectral
>characteristics so more than 1 note is difficult to discern.
>I think that a programme called Cakewalk (version 9?) has a facility
>to do that. I do not know how good it is.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Gabriel
Actually I was aware of this. The point I was making is that our aproach is
simular to MIDI, in that FSG et all represents the positions and timing,
but not the harmonics.
Much of the discussion on the muisc box list results in the same as the
above. Interesting that you can pick up in one post what took 20 or 30 in a
diffrent context.
In the end it all comes down to brute force. Try as many combinations as
fits the model. In our case what have we done to define the model?
-jP


From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 14 01:10:51 2000
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From: jporter@ricochet.net (Julie Porter)
Subject: Re: OT - Enough to Gag a Maggot
Sender: jim@mail.rand.org
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>On 11 Sep 2000, at 23:52, Julie Porter wrote:
>> Another
>> problem I recently ran into is in music to take a analog recording
>> (*.wav) and convert it to a MIDI file, recording the keys and timings
>> of the instrument played. A person with a trained ear can do this
>> without thinking.
>
>Hi Julie,
>It is  not easy to transform a sound to MIDI unless it is a
>monophonic source. I know that there are a couple of programs
>claiming to do that, but I was told that none works very well.
>The problem is that while the wav is the sound data, the MIDI format
>is just the "note" data. The transformation programmes usually work
>by Fourier Transforming the data and looking at the peaks in the
>spectrum (those should be the fundamental) but as you can
>imagine, different instruments have different spectral
>characteristics so more than 1 note is difficult to discern.
>I think that a programme called Cakewalk (version 9?) has a facility
>to do that. I do not know how good it is.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Gabriel
Actually I was aware of this. The point I was making is that our aproach is
simular to MIDI, in that FSG et all represents the positions and timing,
but not the harmonics.
Much of the discussion on the muisc box list results in the same as the
above. Interesting that you can pick up in one post what took 20 or 30 in a
diffrent context.
In the end it all comes down to brute force. Try as many combinations as
fits the model. In our case what have we done to define the model?
-jP


From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 14 04:58:04 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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On 12 Sep 2000, at 21:47, Brian Eric Farnell wrote:
> Claus Anders wrote:
> > Today I had the idea to make a bitmap of the VMS:
> > 1. For every char in VMS I compute the frequncy and assign a color
> > to the char depending on frequency: from red (low frequncy) to blue
> > (high frequency).

> I like it, this is sort of what I have been thinking about with
> music, though it looks like similar things have been done
> before.  I was thinking about assigning each letter a value and
> then drawing the curve between the values so that while still
> keeping to two dimensions, you can show letter, word position
> and have some data regarding relationships between letters.  I
> was still trying to find a meaningful way to assign the values,
> some method reproduceable with any piece of known or unknown
> text

If one is interested in the correlation between symbols, then 
assigning numerical values to the symbols of a symbolic sequence 
introduces bias in the new sequence. This has been done in the 
past with DNA sequences and it has been heavily criticised in the 
literature.
The characteristics of the newly made numerical sequence will vary 
with the selection of the numbers you assign to each symbol.

I am about to finish some correlation analysis of long texts. I hope to 
post some of the results soon.

Cheers,

Gabriel


From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 14 08:43:44 2000
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Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> I think the most urgent thing to study is the gallows bit correlation.
> (Map each word to the number of gallows letters it contains, then
> study the statistics of the resulting digit string.)
> 
> As you must all be aware of by now, the result consists of 0's and 1's
> almost exclusively, and there are surprisingly long runs of 1's and
> 0's. This correlation between successive words severely constrains the
> VMs theories, crypto or otherwise.

 I wish I had access to a good copy of the VMS, how accessible
is the CD ROM version going to be?  I have a keen interest in
the drawings.  I have all the pages from Yale and would like to
see more.  I'm only up to 1995 on the past messages, I haven't
yet found a really good analyses of them.  I'd like to try to
peg the symbolism to a school of thought.  I've seen one
description as a model of pregnancy, but I looked at that page
and saw a description of breaking compounds ino their
components, the different positions and actions of the nymphs
describing solutes and a precipitate as well as gasses boiling
off.  I believe that's 58r.  You can see the nymphs kind of
angry in a chamber to the bottom left (probably because they are
being boiled) and they seem to be trying to stick together. 
Then they move to the bottom middle chamber with a babe in a
bucket representing a precipitate while a nymph floating above
seems to be in solution.  Still others are exiting through the
top.  From that I took all of the other babes in tubs to
indicate an element (or a compound they couldn't or didn't ant
to break) with it's 'pure spirit' captured, ie pure. I think if
we understood enough of what the hieroglyphics mean, we might be
able to use their method of symbolism to peg the VMS to a school
of thought or a region.  I know using anthropomorphic figures to
represent reactions wasn't uncommon, but I've only seen the
later glossy versions.  There they also seem to represent larger
concepts.  I don't know if it's got merit or not, but it's worth
a try.  If the nymphs represent elements, maybe some of the
other diagrams will show us their planetary correspondances
along with their names.  How prevalent was the use of latin
names for elements across languages in the alchemical world?  My
guess is that they were mostly Latin, with possibilities for
Greek and Arabic.  Some of those astrological diagrams with all
of the hot chicks look like alchemical 'periodic tables'.  Maybe
that's our Rosetta Stone.  If we could find a place where we
expected to find Latin tossed in, it would go along way towards
understanding the cipher.
Reagrds,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 14 17:40:28 2000
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From: "Roman A. Surma" <roman_surma@mail.ru>
To: <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Rongorongo Link
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 01:38:20 +0400
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Dear all,

I've found following link about rongorongo script decryption:

http://www.openweb.ru/rongo/index.htm

I have not enough time to browse through this site, but it seems quite
intresting to read about the methods used for decypherment...

Roman Surma.

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 14 18:06:07 2000
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Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 15:05:26 -0700
From: sjm <sethm@loomcom.com>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Rongorongo Link
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On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 01:38:20AM +0400, Roman A. Surma wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I've found following link about rongorongo script decryption:
> 
> http://www.openweb.ru/rongo/index.htm
> 
> I have not enough time to browse through this site, but it seems quite
> intresting to read about the methods used for decypherment...
> 
> Roman Surma.

My God! You've posted ideal Jacques Guy bait!  This must be a subtle
ploy to get him more involved on the Voynich list.  Good work,
I'll remember this trick in the future.

I've not looked at Rongorongo script in ages, so I'll refrain from
commenting on the link itself.  But I remember as a young boy being
terribly fascinated by the supposed link between Rongorongo script
and the Mohenjodaro seal script.  I believe it has been shown
that there is in fact no link whatsoever, but for a young mind
with a fertile imagination, it was a lot of fun to ponder ancient
Dravidians sharing technology with Easter Islanders.

I'm afraid this doesn't have anything to do with the VMS at this
point, so I'll shut up now.

-Seth

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 14 20:05:38 2000
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Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 00:07:15 +0000
From: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
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sjm wrote:
 
> On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 01:38:20AM +0400, Roman A. Surma wrote:

> > http://www.openweb.ru/rongo/index.htm
 
> My God! You've posted ideal Jacques Guy bait!

And I bite!

> This must be a subtle
> ploy to get him more involved on the Voynich list.

I am right out of ideas, just the occasional silly
joke. The more I think about it, the more I fathom
the depths of my ignorance: how can you tell a
meaningful text, short of obvious nonsense (e.g.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaa...)? I don't know.

 
> I've not looked at Rongorongo script in ages, so I'll refrain from
> commenting on the link itself. 

I am well acquainted with  the author's theories, as
I helped him get published by the Journal of the
Polynesian Society some 15 years ago. His budding
theories made some sense back then, but since, he
has gone off the track, completely. What particularly
annoys me is that he insists on using a completely
idiosyncratic transcription system instead of 
Thomas Barthel's, which is used by everybody. He
has no excuse because I sent him photocopies of
Barthel's nomenclature of signs. Barthel's system
is explained there:

http://www.rongorongo.org/corpus/codes.html

It is as if someone was discussing the VMS using
his own transliteration system and steadfastly
refused to use *any* of the existing ones!
And had decided that (EVA) ee = a = y and therefore
systematically confused all three as "5". And worse...

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 14 20:42:49 2000
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Message-ID: <39C219ED.4861CB9C@mail.msen.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 08:45:33 -0400
From: Bruce Grant <bgrant@mail.msen.com>
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These are a couple of thoughts, admittedly not completely thought
throught, about the _process_ of trying to crack the VMS:

1.   Entropy is a popular measure to calculate and speculate with, but
it depends sensitively on the definition
        of what the alphabet is. Would it be possible to develop some
type of measure which would be
        independent of the alphabet? I am thinking of something like the
statistics used for data without
        numerical values (e.g. rankings rather than measurements). Even
if such a measure would not allow
        you to say "this text has the same information content as Latin
with every letter replaced by a pair"
        or something like that, it might allow you to say "the text
becomes more repetitive in the middle than
        at the beginning" or so on.

2.    A lot of interesting ideas, such as the current discussion of
gallows letters, are floated, and calculations
        are produced, etc. then the ideas disappear into the archives.
Is there some way to gather
       such quantitative questions or theories and the resulting
statistics about ut the VMS into one place
      (say, a FAQ) where  you could look at it all at once?

3.    In order to do item #2, would it be worthwhile to try to produce
from the EVA transcription file a
        single machine readable transcription in a convenient form for
compuertized processing, even if
        it were necessary to:

                make some kinds of assumptions
                omit parts that cannot be reconciled between the
different versions
                convert to a/the standard alphabet
                standardize the line-numbering scheme
                etc.?

4.    If this were done, what would be a useful format?  XML?
Relational tables? Simple lists of lines or words? Something else?

Bruce Grant

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep 15 15:45:35 2000
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Message-ID: <39C27D9D.FBC75281@voynich.nu>
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 21:50:53 +0200
From: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene Zandbergen)
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Bruce Grant wrote:

> 2. A lot of interesting ideas, such as the current discussion of
>    gallows letters, are floated, and calculations are produced,
>    etc. then the ideas disappear into the archives.
>    Is there some way to gather such quantitative questions or
>    theories and the resulting statistics about ut the VMS into one
>    place (say, a FAQ) where  you could look at it all at once?

Did someone say 'bait'?   :-)
These are my thoughts exactly and my attempts to create this (already
starting many many years ago) have been thwarted by various
difficulties.
A one-man effort won't do it. Organizing the material is very difficult,
and I always felt that it was a presumptuous thing to take the work of
some many people of over almost a decade and sort it into
'important', 'interesting', 'useless', etc. 

Another reason why it is difficult is that we are not an organised
research group. We are all individuals doing our own thing (with
occasional
exceptions) but we do keep the group informed of ideas via the list.
That is of course a very good thing, but we are nothing like a Third
Friedman's Study Groups.
We don't even have 'official' tables of single character frequency,
digraph frequency, word frequency, for the whole MS in _any_
transcription alphabet.
This is the first thing that such a FAQ should contain.

Another obvious reason why one person can't do it is that it is too much
work. Also, there are so much 'fun' things to do. Furthermore, some
things cannot be done in piecemeal fashion, but require a consistent
dedicated effort over some time. This is particularly true for
transcription, but also for writing a good overview (in the sense you
used).

Right now, personally, I am definitely reduced to doing piecemeal things
(such as reading Evans' Rudolf and his world - should have done that 
years ago).

A couple of years ago there was a list member who called himself
Aligator Descartes, who used a tool to convert the mailing list
archive to a  hyper-linked mail history overview (which is no longer
there). That already greatly increased the usefulness of the archive,
and would be a necessary first step for a renewed attempt at creating
the kind of overview we do indeed need to have.

I am sure there are several people on the list who can do this. It
would probably take the space of two geocities accounts to
host this info. I have one available that can be used right now. It
is called 'voynichms' and was originally conceived as a backup for my
main web site.

The condensed information would only be a few megabytes and I would be 
glad to host it at www.voynich.nu. Right now, there is a kind of
placeholder called www.voynich.nu/list.html which mainly has links
to some interesting web pages, but also makes a first attempt at
collecting all the 'odd features' of Voynichese. It was supposed to be
the 'meat' of my website but in reality it is the leastdevelopped area,
for reasons explained at the beginning of this post.

I invite all your suggestions for a cure...

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep 15 16:47:53 2000
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Message-ID: <000b01c01f56$ca02bf00$ad946395@outlander>
Reply-To: "John Grove" <John@morewood.net>
From: "John Grove" <4groves@sprint.ca>
To: "Voynich List" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: One for the Crippy enthusiasts...
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 16:51:54 -0400
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Not in the least bit Voynich related, but I've been playing with a little
javascript file to encrypt text for kids to send secret messages to one
another

Not being cryptanalytically trained (and the fact that the script was
written in javascript and thus is available to be viewed in any viewer), my
little toy encryption script might not be as sound as I think it is, but it
was fun in the making. http://www.morewood.net/tochka28/cipher.htm

    John.

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep 18 03:38:09 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
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Subject: VMS->Bitmap Image
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 09:36:37 +0200
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Dear all,
last weekend I converted the VMS into a bitmap image.But... the result was
rather uninteresting or otherwise it was quite boring. I converted single
chars, bigraphs and words according their frequency with assigning spectral
colors to the  frequency of the item.I.e red->low frequency and
magenta->most common item.
The results: all pages look similar the high freq. spectrum colors were
dominat everywhere. Only in the labels departments other colors could be
seen.
The only (IMHO) interesting feature I could recognize was that with higher
folio # the pages become more denser.
Sorry for no better news
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 Sep 18 15:44:11 2000
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	I like this idea!!   I believe the page is f75r (the
boiling babes are in the right bottom corner).  It
makes sense, more sense than anything I've heard in
quite a while.

	Adam McLean, what do you think?  (Incidentally, I'll
post a note that Adam sent me a long time ago and I
just put in the Historical Precedents.)  

Brian Eric Farnell wrote:

> I'd like to try to
> peg the symbolism to a school of thought.  I've seen one
> description as a model of pregnancy, but I looked at that page
> and saw a description of breaking compounds ino their
> components, the different positions and actions of the nymphs
> describing solutes and a precipitate as well as gasses boiling
> off.  I believe that's 58r.  You can see the nymphs kind of
> angry in a chamber to the bottom left (probably because they are
> being boiled) and they seem to be trying to stick together.
> Then they move to the bottom middle chamber with a babe in a
> bucket representing a precipitate while a nymph floating above
> seems to be in solution.  Still others are exiting through the
> top.  From that I took all of the other babes in tubs to
> indicate an element (or a compound they couldn't or didn't ant
> to break) with it's 'pure spirit' captured, ie pure. I think if
> we understood enough of what the hieroglyphics mean, we might be
> able to use their method of symbolism to peg the VMS to a school
> of thought or a region.  I know using anthropomorphic figures to
> represent reactions wasn't uncommon, but I've only seen the
> later glossy versions.  There they also seem to represent larger
> concepts.  I don't know if it's got merit or not, but it's worth
> a try.  If the nymphs represent elements, maybe some of the
> other diagrams will show us their planetary correspondances
> along with their names.  


> How prevalent was the use of latin
> names for elements across languages in the alchemical world?  My
> guess is that they were mostly Latin, with possibilities for
> Greek and Arabic.  

	Many names would have been Arabic, I guess.  al-chemy
is an Arabic word.  I know that the
(Muslim) Arabs were the first practitioners in the
Middle Ages.  I believe that the works from classical
times were in Greek, so you could have a lot of that
too.  I've seen a number of alchemical works that use
Latin, but of course those are just the ones commonly
available at ordinary libraries in the West.

> Some of those astrological diagrams with all
> of the hot chicks look like alchemical 'periodic tables'.  Maybe
> that's our Rosetta Stone.  If we could find a place where we
> expected to find Latin tossed in, it would go along way towards
> understanding the cipher.

	See Adam's note below.  Alas, I doubt we'll find
anything obvious in alchemy.  From what I've seen,
they were never very consistent. I (a chemical
engineer) have never taken the time to understand the
chemical (as opposed to the mystical) part of alchemy. 
Sometimes they used the four classical 
elements (air, water, earth, and fire). Sometimes they
added a fifth element - the quintessence -
that underlay the basic four.  They no doubt hoped that
if one could isolate the quintessence, they could turn
it into anything -- especially gold!  Sometimes they
thought the elements were mercury, sulfur, and salt
(NaCl).  It's easy to see mercury and sulfur, since
they react to mercurous sulfate, but I don't understand
how salt fits in.  

	They seem to have been pretty casual about handling
mercury and some no doubt died for
it.  Nowadays mercury is handled with a great deal of
respect; I've seen a big change over the course of
my own life.  (I remember seeing a note somewhere in
cyberspace that said that mercury was the semen of
Shiva! It will certainly maim or destroy you; ask the
citizens of Minimata.)

	Anyway, here's Adam's note.

Dennis

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[EDITOR'S NOTE:  Adam McLean is probably the world's
greatest expert
on alchemy.   Therefore, this note is probably the last
word on the
subject. ]

Subject: Re: Your Expert Opinion on the VMs
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 17:36:43 +0000
From: Adam McLean <alchemy@dial.pipex.com>
To: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>

At 09:40 AM 11/19/98 -0600, you wrote:
>Hello, Adam!  I know about your extensive knowledge of alchemy.  Mary
>D'Imperio, in her survey of VMs studies up to 1978, thought that alchemy
>might be the key to understanding the VMs.  However, current
>voynich@rand.org list members, including myself, see little if any
>alchemical content in the VMs.  None of us, however, are experts.  
>
>What is your opinion on this.  What alchemical imagery can you see in
>the VMs?

Dear Dennis 

All I can say is that I have never seen an alchemical
manuscript
with the same imagery and pictures as are found in the
Voynich.
The plant drawings in  the 'Herbal section' have many
forerunners some 
going back centuries before the Voynich, as has been
extensively 
documented. The drawings in the Astronomical section
again seem to
have many parallels in known manuscripts. 

The main 'alchemical' resonance is supposed to be the
'balneological'
section, but here I find no parallels with alchemical
manuscripts,
except in a very general way. If this was an alchemical
work one 
would expect to find some other alchemical manuscript
with similar
drawings - but I do not know of one. The drawings after
all are not in code!

I have an open mind on the subject, but have yet to see
any real parallels.
Perhaps one day I will find a manuscript that I
recognize has common
features with the Voynich - but not so far.

My view is that we can only 'crack' the Voynich when we
can put it into 
some context. The herbal section is probably the most
amenable to
this approach as there are many early herbals with
similar structures.
It really needs someone to make a study of the
semiotics of herbals,
and see if any of these features can be recognized as
patterns in the
Voynich text. Such things as repetitions of phrases,
maybe things like
"collect the fruits in the month of" or "this plant is
for the lungs". If the
Voynich section is a herbal then it should share some
of such
phrases, and one might be able to find repetitive
elements that give
us a clue to the way in which Voynichese is structured
and written.

I don't think I could  find any way at present to use
alchemical manuscripts
or ideas to throw light on the 'Balneological section.

It may be that it will be someone with a background in
semiotics rather
than cryptography that will first read the Voynich MS.
I don't think it 
will be a scholar of alchemy.

Best wishes,

Adam McLean
----------------------
alchemy@dial.pipex.com
Web site:  http://www.levity.com/alchemy/home.html
Alchemy Web bookstore: 
http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/alchemy/index.html



> Reagrds,
> Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep 18 17:02:33 2000
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Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 16:02:01 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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Bruce Grant wrote:
> 
> These are a couple of thoughts, admittedly not completely thought
> throught, about the _process_ of trying to crack the VMS:
> 
> 1.   Entropy is a popular measure to calculate and speculate with, but
> it depends sensitively on the definition
>         of what the alphabet is. Would it be possible to develop some
> type of measure which would be
>         independent of the alphabet? I am thinking of something like the
> statistics used for data without
>         numerical values (e.g. rankings rather than measurements). Even
> if such a measure would not allow
>         you to say "this text has the same information content as Latin
> with every letter replaced by a pair"
>         or something like that, it might allow you to say "the text
> becomes more repetitive in the middle than
>         at the beginning" or so on.

	Look at Stolfi's 
Where are the bits?
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/98-07-09-local-entropy/

Of course, he used entropy to do this, but it does
allow you to compare different texts and different
characters in context.

	I've struggled a lot with how entropy is dependent on
the alphabet chosen.  There's no way around the fact
that you can *potentially* include more information in
a larger character set.  You can also do a worse or
better job of using any character set.  

	You can compute the maximum entropy of any order for
any size character set, of course.  If you want to
exclude the effect of rare characters (the ampersand &
in typical English text, the picnic table in
Voynichese), use the number of characters that comprise
say 99% of the text.  Then compare the entropy
calculated for a given text to the maximum entropy of
the 99% character set.  

	But how do different languages compare on
communication efficiency?  Japanese is supposed to be a
vague and ambiguous language in speech; it has a
phonemic inventory of about 16 consonants and 10 vowels
(with short/long vowel distinction).  However, Jacques
told me that Tahitian is no more ambiguous that English
or French, and it probably has a phonemic inventory,
like Hawai'ian, of 10 vowels (again including
long/short) and and 8 consonants!!!  There the entropy
numbers help you not at all.

> 2.    A lot of interesting ideas, such as the current discussion of
> gallows letters, are floated, and calculations
>         are produced, etc. then the ideas disappear into the archives.
> Is there some way to gather
>        such quantitative questions or theories and the resulting
> statistics about ut the VMS into one place
>       (say, a FAQ) where  you could look at it all at once?

	It would certainly be nice to have something like
that, but it would be a lot of work for one person at
least -- and then it would reflect only the ideas and
prejudices of one person!  

	We could have a list of links to the major papers list
members have written on topics such as entropy,
Voynichese word paradigms, Zipf's law, the strokes of
the Voynich characters, etc.  There are fewer of these
papers, so prejudice would be a smaller factor. Such a
collection might be a good idea; it ought to be like
having a book called "The VMs since D'Imperio".  

	However, my impression is that those papers are
relatively long on statistics and relatively short on
hypotheses.  Does anyone else have the same
impression?  

> 3.    In order to do item #2, would it be worthwhile to try to produce
> from the EVA transcription file a
>         single machine readable transcription in a convenient form for
> compuertized processing, even if
>         it were necessary to:
> 
>                 make some kinds of assumptions
>                 omit parts that cannot be reconciled between the
> different versions
>                 convert to a/the standard alphabet
>                 standardize the line-numbering scheme
>                 etc.?
> 
> 4.    If this were done, what would be a useful format?  XML?
> Relational tables? Simple lists of lines or words? Something else?

	We have Takeshi's complete transcription and Stolfi's
majority version, so we already have useful versions in
EVA text.  Beyond that I really don't know.  Little
work has been done on the syntax of Voynichese, so it's
hard to say what database format would be good.    

	BTW.  For my work on Hamptonese I've prepared a short
corpus of phonetic English.  By distinguishing upper-
and lower-case letters, I have one phoneme per
character.  I'll put it on my Hamptonese page in a
while.  Phonetic English has a somewhat high entropy
drop (h1-h2):

Language + writing          h1-h2
-------------------------   -----------
Latin                       ~0.7
English                      0.83-0.94
Phonetic English             0.95
Hawai'ian (full phonemic)    0.92
Japanese (romaji)           ~1.1
Hamptonese                   1.2
Voynichese (EVA)             1.8

	Hamptonese has ~10 vowels and ~21 consonants, so I'm
assuming it's phonetic English.  It still looks quite
weird; it may teach us something about the VMs.

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep 18 18:03:03 2000
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    > [Bruce Grant:] Entropy is a popular measure to calculate and
    > speculate with, but it depends sensitively on [the alphabet].
    
Indeed, entropy is a property of the encoding, not of the language
or the contents.
    
    > Would it be possible to develop some type of measure which would
    > be independent of the alphabet?
    
The character-based n-th order entropy is independent of simple
substitution, but is affected by almost anything else --
polyalphabetic and Vigenre ciphers, multi-character and
variable-length substitutions, nulls, etc. Word-based statistics and
character correlation analysis (as done by Gabriel Landini and Mark
Perakh) are somewhat more robust, but not much.  In the limit,
a very efficient encoding (like "zip") will produce 
random-looking, uniform-probability strings with no 
apparent structure.

    > 3. In order to do item #2, would it be worthwhile to try to produce
    > from the EVA transcription file a single machine readable transcription
    > in a convenient form for compuertized processing [...]
    
Takeshi Takahashi prepared a transcription which is essentially 
complete. (I recall that at some point
it was missing a couple of lines or a few labels, but that 
is probably fixed by now.)  That version has been
incorporated in the EVA interlinear (code H).

I also have 
 
  a "consensus" merge of all transcribers (code Y)
 
  a "majority vote" merge of all transcribers (code A)
  
These two versions have "*"s where there was no consensus or no
absolute majority, respectively.  You will find them in 

  http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/EXPORT/projects/voynich/
  
The files are
  
  00-06-07-word-grammar/Notes/045/only-m.evt.gz (or .zip)
  00-06-07-word-grammar/Notes/045/only-c.evt.gz (or .zip)

These files are in essentially standard EVT format, with
page and line numbers,  comments, fillers, etc.
If you can compile C code, you can install Rene's VTT program
and use it to extract the bare text, without these decorations.

    > If this were done, what would be a useful format?  XML?
    > Relational tables? Simple lists of lines or words?
    
I generally start from the EVT file, and use VTT and/or little AWK
programs to extract word lists, concordances, etc..

All the best,

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep 18 21:13:31 2000
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From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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Bruce Grant wrote:
> 
> 2.  A lot of interesting ideas, such as the current discussion of
> gallows letters, are floated, and calculations
>  are produced, etc. then the ideas disappear into the archives.
> Is there some way to gather
> such quantitative questions or theories and the resulting
> statistics about ut the VMS into one place
> (say, a FAQ) where  you could look at it all at once?

	I've thought better of this.  Certainly someone could
go through the archives, clip out the various
hypotheses that have been proposed, and put them into a
"hypotheses" file -- rather as I have been doing with
Historical Precedents.  This would be "quick and
dirty", just cut-and-paste with no attempt to make it
pretty or do deep thinking about the hypotheses thus
found.  I think that's doable.  Admittedly the
compiler's prejudices would affect this, but I think
that most of us are sufficiently open-minded that it
wouldn't be a problem.  After all, my prejudices affect
what I put into the Historical Precedents document, but
I still think it very useful.

	I'd volunteer, but I've got other irons in the fire. 
I'm hot and heavy on Hamptonese.  And I need to get a
job!!!  I've been so sick that I haven't held a job in
more than a year, but I finally feel well enough to
start looking.  

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep 18 23:36:03 2000
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From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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	Here's something I've long wondered about.  We know
that if you have a decipherment system with enough
knobs to twiddle and/or an unknown text that is short
enough, you can read anything into anything.  Typically
such bogus systems are exposed as bogus by reduction to
absurdity.  Thus Friedmann used the Shakespearean
ciphers to read that he, William Friedmann, had written
Shakespeare's plays himself.  The detractors of the
"Bible Code" used that system to read prophecies of
assassinations of world leaders into "Moby Dick".

	I wonder if there is some rigorous mathematical system
to disprove such systems.  I think that the statistical
concept of "degrees of freedom" is involved, but I'm
not a good enough mathematician to carry it further.  

	Some systems are loose enough to read things into a
text of any size, no matter how large.  Edo Nyland's
system may be an example of this.  

	Some systems read isolated snippets of intelligible
text in a large text.  The Bible Code is an example of
this.  

	Other systems only work on short unknown texts.  The
Phaistos Disk is a very short text; therefore many
systems can read intelligible text into it, and many of
these systems would fail on a longer sample of Phaistos
Disk text.  

	So.  Could we find the degrees of freedom in a
decipherment scheme, the degrees of freedom in the
ciphertext, and prove whether the two taken together
constitute a valid or a bogus decipherment system?

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 19 00:03:09 2000
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        "The Mathematics of Crankery" (Sep 18, 22:35)
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What Dennis is asking is very close to the idea of  the
"unicity distance" in Claude Shannon's 1949 paper
"Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems", refered to by
Friedman in his "Shakespearean Ciphers Examined", page 22.
Wish I had time to expound futher.  It's discussed in
elementary information theory textbooks and in crypto books
written by people with an information theory bent.  There
are a few papers on the subject in "Cryptologia", and one
by Martin Hellman in the IEEE IT journal in about 1978.
I am very fond of the treatement in a little MIT press paperback
by Gordon Raisbeck, published in the early 1960s.

On Sep 18, 22:35, Dennis wrote:

> Subject: The Mathematics of Crankery
> 	Here's something I've long wondered about.  We know
> that if you have a decipherment system with enough
> knobs to twiddle and/or an unknown text that is short
> enough, you can read anything into anything.  Typically
> such bogus systems are exposed as bogus by reduction to
> absurdity.  Thus Friedmann used the Shakespearean
> ciphers to read that he, William Friedmann, had written
> Shakespeare's plays himself.  The detractors of the
> "Bible Code" used that system to read prophecies of
> assassinations of world leaders into "Moby Dick".
> 
> 	I wonder if there is some rigorous mathematical system
> to disprove such systems.  I think that the statistical
> concept of "degrees of freedom" is involved, but I'm
> not a good enough mathematician to carry it further.  
> 
> 	Some systems are loose enough to read things into a
> text of any size, no matter how large.  Edo Nyland's
> system may be an example of this.  
> 
> 	Some systems read isolated snippets of intelligible
> text in a large text.  The Bible Code is an example of
> this.  
> 
> 	Other systems only work on short unknown texts.  The
> Phaistos Disk is a very short text; therefore many
> systems can read intelligible text into it, and many of
> these systems would fail on a longer sample of Phaistos
> Disk text.  
> 
> 	So.  Could we find the degrees of freedom in a
> decipherment scheme, the degrees of freedom in the
> ciphertext, and prove whether the two taken together
> constitute a valid or a bogus decipherment system?
> 
> Dennis
>-- End of excerpt from Dennis



-- 
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  Tue Sep 19 10:21:31 2000
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    > [Brian Eric Farnell:] I've seen one [VMS figure] description as
    > a model of pregnancy
    
The picture at the bottom of page f66r has sometimes been
interpreted as a woman giving birth. 

The illustrations on f77v surely must be related to reproductive and
digestive organs. (While in each figure the resemblance could be
explained away as mere coincidence, that explanation is not tenable
for the set as a whole.)

Of course, the exact relationship is open to debate. The figures could
be simply anatomical drawings, but could also be allegories showing
the healing properties of certain baths or concoctions. They may be
botanical parts notable for their resemblance to human organs.
(Consider the mythology surrounding the mandrake root, and the
aphrodisiac properties popularly ascribed to certain natural products
solely because of their suggestive shape.) They could also be drawings
of bizarre anatomically-shaped bathtubs, or alchemical vessels, or...

Several other illustrations readily suggest anatomical drawings
(e.g. the two bulby things in f83v), but f77v is the most convincing
example, IMHO.

    > [I] saw a description of breaking compounds into their
    > components, the different positions and actions of the nymphs
    > describing solutes and a precipitate as well as gasses boiling
    > off.
    
That is certainly a possible interpretation!  However, it does not
remove the need to explain the anatomical imagery in f77v.
    
One big problem, as Dennis and Adam Mclean pointed out, is that the
VMs imagery doesn't look at all like "typical" alchemical imagery, of
which many examples can be found in Adam's site.

    > Some of those astrological diagrams with all of the hot chicks
    > look like alchemical 'periodic tables'.

Perhaps.... but that would be quite surprising, since the "periodic
tables" of the alchemists were generally based on the 4 "classical"
elements and combinations thereof. On the other hand, Rene and others
have found astronomical/astrological charts that do resemble the VMs
"zodiac" diagrams, at least in the overall layout.

All the best,

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 19 12:24:23 2000
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From: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene Zandbergen)
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Jorge Stolfi wrote:

> The illustrations on f77v surely must be related to reproductive and
> digestive organs. (While in each figure the resemblance could be
> explained away as mere coincidence, that explanation is not tenable
> for the set as a whole.)

Especially as there is a known medieval balneological text which
mentions
exactly these organs, including the fact that the intestines are being
washed, and that the owner of the male sexual organs is troubled by
'stone' (note the dust, partly hidden by the clamp holding the page in
the Yale copyflo). All these things could be cured by the water of one
particular spring or bath. To me this makes perfect sense.

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 19 12:36:51 2000
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Message-ID: <39C797A8.DFDDEA7D@voynich.nu>
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 18:43:20 +0200
From: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene Zandbergen)
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Making an overview of 'observations' (rather than hypotheses) is
of prime importance. Whenever new journalists approach one
of us for a 'story' on the VMs, they want to know about
breakthroughs. Over the years there have been a number of
new remarkable 'observations', none of which could be 
readily understood by anyone who is not already familiar
with the problem. Thus, we cannot report any breakthroughs, but
still progress is being made all the time.

If we keep adding new observations, at some point a 'critical
mass' might be reached and the puzzle could be solved
(possibly also in the negative sense, that there is proof of
nonsensical contents of the MS).

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 19 20:53:15 2000
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Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 08:55:10 -0400
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Rene Zandbergen wrote:

> If we keep adding new observations, at some point a 'critical
> mass' might be reached and the puzzle could be solved
> (possibly also in the negative sense, that there is proof of
> nonsensical contents of the MS).

I may be wrong, but it seems like the same theories come back every few
years, e.g.
    - maybe the letters are some kind of Roman numerals
    - maybe it's some sort of Arabic
    - maybe the apparent word breaks really aren't
    - etc.

If these hypotheses and any stats which make them more plausible could
be gathered in one place, it would not be necessary to cover the same
old ground over and over.

Bruce

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 20 11:14:01 2000
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Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 10:12:03 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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--------------B092BEF488376EDA3187A4EC
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     I fear I'm becoming a crank with my work on
Hamptonese.  Once again, here's my website.

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

	 Lynda Hartigan, the Smithsonian lady who handles
Hampton issues, said that most people believe that
Hamptonese is either written glossalalia or something
belonging to a tradition of Afro-American "spirit
writing", which sounds like vaguely meaningful symbols
that may be produced in a trance state and are not
standardized.  

	I recall Moonhawk's saying that there is no such thing
as written glossalalia.  As for the other, here's a
site on African writing systems (quite interesting in
their own right!):

http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/List_of_Scripts.html

	Here there are some genuine African syllabaries,
somewhat in the spirit of Sequoyah's Cherokee
syllabary, but I don't think that's "spirit writing" . 
Also, "Nsibidi is a writing system of the Ejagham
people of Nigeria. It is seen on tombstones, secret
society buildings, costumes, ritual fans, headdresses,
textiles, and in gestures, body and ground painting." 
This is an ideographic system, probably not "spirit
writing" either. 

	I have an article with a bibliography on Afro-American
spirit writing but haven't yet read any items. In any
case I decided upon a cryptographic attack.  

	I did typical single-letter and digraph frequency
counts on a small (~855 char's) corpus of Hamptonese. 
Since the number of vowels and consonants point to
phonetic English, I tried to solve it as such. 

	Hamptonese has a large set of "stroke" characters,
characters organized around a stroke like /  .  I
noticed that almost all the characters identified by
the Sukhotin algorithm as vowels are *not* stroke
characters.  Therefore, I redesignated all stroke
characters as vowels.  There are no word spaces in
Hamptonese.  

	I prepared a 4500-char corpus of phonetic English.  I
used text from the Fanetiks site:

http://hometown.aol.com/Fanetiks

	By distinguishing lower- and upper-case letters, I
made a one phoneme per letter BITRANS conversion.  u is
the schwa, vowels in lower case are lax and vowels in
upper case are tense.  A is a as in "hat".  D is dh,
thus "the" -> "Du".  The rest should be fairly clear.  

	I tried to solve it as a simple substitution cipher by
making Hamptonese fit the single-letter and digraph
frequencies of the phonetic English corpus.  Below are
some examples from my first try.  All I see is a lot of
repetitious mumbo-jumbo. Hampton repeated the syllables
"nuh" and "tuh" a lot, but even if you pull those out
as nulls, it's still mumbo-jumbo, with h1-h2 ~= 1.2. 
(The text below has strings of more than one "nuh"
reduced to a single "nuh".)  There may be a word game,
but I haven't yet seen it.  If anyone sees more, please
tell me!!!


Dennis

----------------------------------------------------------------------

	Page 92 (text only):

otunEununu
nAnArAniI
ArnnunUonua
onanutunununu
tunununnArnwa
kAnturaonua
kaIwrnunua
wnuDununura
Untuitunuru
rtufkatinu
tuwrDutunu
tinuDwaena
wenianiniDi
nuweueuDnini
naekaIwAia
erkawrunu
erkaIIkaylm
tuDltunununu
ntituernwui
ninaIwnnwwu
wnntunununuI
Enrnueernununa
neEEtEtuDuEti
lktunioenunt
mlnunueruEi
lssstuDIsusu

     Here are corresponding positions on two tables of
the 10 Commandments:

<p10:2>  Apil                         <p9:2>  Apul
<p10:11> EzOset                       <p9:2> 
AzOsen{?}t 
<p10:3>  Etlbu                        <p9:3>  Etlwu 
<p10:12> AxUulz                       <p9:3>  Dsulz
<p10:5>  yIunu                        <p9:4>  Iunu 
<p10:13> D*lOz                        <p9:4>  AlOz 
<p10:6>  yltusO                       <p9:5> 
Altu{?}sO  
<p10:14> yxuzO                        <p9:5>  xuzO
<p10:7>  yAEssu                       <p9:6> 
dsssu{unclear} {[I]   no other gods }
<p10:15> ymOiu                        <p9:6> 
mOiu           {[VI]  no murder} 
<p10:8>  yEEAut                       <p9:7> 
EEAtu          {[II]  no graven image} 
<p10:16> ynnUOzu                      <p9:7> 
nns{?}Ozu      {[VII] no adultery}  
<p10:9>  yer{3 r's}ut                 <p9:8> 
der{3!}ut      {[III] not God's name in vain} 
<p10:17> yeuUu                        <p9:8> 
buUu           {[VIII]don't steal} 
<p10:10> dltAt                        <p9:9> 
EltAt          {[IV]  remember the Sabbath} 
<p10:18> yUuOeu                       <p9:9> 
KUdOvu         {[IX]  no false witness} 
<p10:11> EzOset                       <p9:10>
Iunu           {[V]   honor father & mother}
<p10:19> AUnOi                        <p9:10>
pUddOi         {[X]   don't covet }    

	The BITRANS script is attached.  Vowels and consonants
are in descending frequency for each group.
--------------B092BEF488376EDA3187A4EC
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii;
 name="Hp2engv2"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline;
 filename="Hp2engv2"

{(comment)} {(comment)}
<(comment)> <(comment)>
(comment) vowels
v   u
i   a
l   i
n   e
k   A
f   I
w   E
e   o
o   O
g   U
q   ay
a   Y
b   *
J   *
(comment) consonants
y   n
p   t
r   r
d   s
u   D
c   d
h   l
z   k
s   z
x   w
j   x
m   m
T   y
U   p
D   b
Y   v
t   f

--------------B092BEF488376EDA3187A4EC--

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 20 11:16:24 2000
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Reply-To: "John Grove" <John@morewood.net>
From: "John Grove" <4groves@sprint.ca>
To: "Voynich List" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Page order
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 11:18:36 -0400
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Good Morning all,

    An early owner of the VMS was carrying the loose sheets of vellum and
tripped, dropping the sheets into a confusing pile. He was able to put most
of the obvious pages back in some semblance of order, zodiac pages were easy
enough - and since the pisces was on the back of a cosmo page obviously the
cosmo pages must go before the zodiac ones. But how could he be sure which
pages went where when so many just had single plant images on them. Quickly
stacking the loose pieces back into a pile, he decided on a rough order and
had them bound together.

    Well, that's the scenario... Now for the reshuffling of a few pages:

    First, I think we could put all the Herbal-A pages in one section and
all the Herbal-B in another. When we do this, we notice that two Herbal-B
pages have something other than Herbal-B on the opposite side. These begin
f57r and f66v! So, if we looked at the opposite pages f57v and f66r we find
that we're looking at material that COULD go into another section. Hmmm,
let's say that the odd-shaped nymph at the bottom of f66r is the same odd
shaped nymph leaning over a bucket in f84r and that f66r actually belongs
with the bio section. Now, f57v contains four elements in its midst and you
might find several variations of these four elements on the verso side of
the large foldout, so perhaps f57v is part of the cosmo pages - as is the
large foldout itself...

    The new order then becomes something like all Herbal-A pages in one
section, All Pharmaceutical Pages, The Bio pages ending with f66r, All
Herbal-B pages beginning with f66v and ending with f57r, The Cosmo pages
beginning with f57v, followed by the reverse side of the large foldout and
ending with f70 recto foldout, The zodiac pages on f70 verso, and lastly all
the Star pages - including f58r/v.

    The order within some sections is obviously still confused, not knowing
which side is actually recto or verso of some vellum sheets. I'm not sure
what to think of the f49 or f65 sheets yet, and one can't be certain where
to place sections that don't overlap in content such as the Pharmaceutical,
stars, and Herbal-A. It seems (to me) that The Bio pages, Herbal-B, Cosmo,
Zodiac order makes sense though.

    John

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 20 11:29:22 2000
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	for voynich@rand.org; Wed, 20 Sep 2000 16:28:19 +0100
From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Organization: The University of Birmingham, UK.
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 16:26:29 +0100
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Subject: Re: Latest on Hamptonese
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On 20 Sep 2000, at 10:12, Dennis wrote:
>  I tried to solve it as a simple substitution cipher by
> making Hamptonese fit the single-letter and digraph

Here:
http://www.und.edu/org/crypto/crypto/solvers/asolver/

is a little programme to solve substitution ciphers based on digraph 
probabilities. 

Cheers,

Gabriel



From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 20 14:10:29 2000
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Reply-To: "John Grove" <John@morewood.net>
From: "John Grove" <4groves@sprint.ca>
To: "Voynich List" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: New Voynich Order
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 14:13:36 -0400
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Further to my last, I just realized that the Pharma section is all language
A and therefore belongs either preceding or following Herbal-A in my new
ordering schema.

 Thus:  Herbal-A, Pharmaceutical - both in language A followed by
    Bio to 66r, 66v Herbal-B to 57r, 57v Cosmos, zodiac, stars  - All in
language B.

    I also noted that Jorge's plot of 2 May 1998 showed "three fairly
compact clouds that are largely disjoint but still adjacent" (to Bio) and
these broke up into Herbal-A and Pharma being the farthest from the Bio
section, while Stars were the closest, and the remaining sections made up
the third cloud of Herbal-B, Astro, Cosmo and Zodiac.
    Perhaps, the Stars section should precede Bio in my New Voynich Order

John.

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 20 16:00:01 2000
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Message-ID: <39C91882.CB592605@voynich.nu>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 22:05:22 +0200
From: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene Zandbergen)
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In response to both of John's contributions:

> An early owner of the VMS was carrying the loose sheets of vellum and
> tripped, dropping the sheets into a confusing pile. He was able to put most
> of the obvious pages back in some semblance of order....

This early owner could even be the author (or copyist), if he didn't
actually know what he was writing.  

> First, I think we could put all the Herbal-A pages in one section and
> all the Herbal-B in another. 

Note that there are two odd things, and they are somehow complementary:
the herbal section is split in two: a large part in the beginning and a 
shorter part near the end. It is also split in another way: it's written
in two different languages, most of it in 'A' but some in 'B'. It seems
quite possible that the B pages in the first half and the A pages near
the end were simply swapped.
  
> Further to my last, I just realized that the Pharma section is all language
> A and therefore belongs either preceding or following Herbal-A in my new
> ordering schema.

Exactly!
 
>  Thus:  Herbal-A, Pharmaceutical - both in language A followed by...

So far so good. The Pharma section shows a different dialect of 'A' 
language. (To a lesser extent these differences are also noticable in
the
herbal A pages near the end of the MS).  It also introduces 'labels' and
'foldout pages'. That's why I would put the cosmo/astro/zodiac sections
after pharma-A (they're all on foldout pages and are loaded with
labels).
It may be due to the presence of the labels, but the language
of these sections is neither A nor B. It shares the characteristics of
both.
How about calling this 'L'-language? 

After that should follow the three major 'B' sections, which are
different
among themselves, but not very much. They have no foldout pages, and
only
Bio-B uses labels. 

Of course, it is entirely possible that the gradual change in language
should not be correlated with the 'position' in the book - the pages
may not have been written in order.
Note also that only the herbal-B pages show a different hand (I think
the technical term is 'ductus'). Much more cursive but not necessarily
by a different person. I thus don't fully agree with Currier's
correlation
of languages (A / B) and hands (1 / 2).

What we're left with is the mysterious quire which has some herbal, 
some cosmological and some 'stars' pages (fols. 57-66 of which several
are
unfortunately missing). Finding out how exactly this fitted into the 
MS could be important. Note also that the two stars pages (fol.58) are
in A language as opposed to the stars section which is in B. Still, they
share the odd behaviour of the word 'qokeey' which I have commented on 
before.

>     I also noted that Jorge's plot of 2 May 1998 showed "three fairly
> compact clouds that are largely disjoint but still adjacent" (to Bio) and
> these broke up into Herbal-A and Pharma being the farthest from the Bio
> section, while Stars were the closest, and the remaining sections made up
> the third cloud of Herbal-B, Astro, Cosmo and Zodiac.

Here I have to mention my own scatter plots which are based on a
different
statistic (namely digraphs) and which show a contiguous cloud with
clearly
delineated sections (www.voynich.nu/curabcd.html, under reconstruction).
I am not saying that my plot is correct and Jorge's is wrong: they show
two
different things. It is fair to say that we have not yet agreed on an
explanation for this discrepancy.

Checking whether there is any systematic behaviour in the gallows
bit strings over these sections could be very interesting indeed.

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 21 04:54:30 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Organization: The University of Birmingham, UK.
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 09:52:21 +0100
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Hi all,
I cam across this page

http://www.zompist.com/numbers.shtml

I did not have an idea of the number of known artificial languages 
there are...

http://www.zompist.com/last.htm#conlang 

Cheers,

Gabriel

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 21 05:12:53 2000
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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Gallows bit sequences: how embarassing...
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Ahem, hum, how should I put it ...

As you unfortunately must remember, a couple of months ago I claimed
that there was a surprising correlation between the "gallows bits" of
consecutive VMs words (defined as 1 if the word has a gallows letter,
0 if it doesn't). Put another way, the sequence of gallows bits was
not random, but showed many long runs of 0's and 1's:

    ?1110110
    00000110
    1000?1110
    1110100001
    01010000011
    111011111
    111010001
    00??1101
    11011??0?
    0100110110
    1101011001
    110000000001
    11111110

I though the lumping of 0's and 1's was so obvious that there was no
need to compute the statistics. I proceeded to draw all sorts of
conclusions from that phenomenon; I even stopped believing in the
Chinese theory, conjectured that the language was Turkish, and spent a
fair amount of time (and e-mail) exploring this new path.

Well, I finally did my homework: I tabulated the number of runs of
each length, and ... how embarassing!

  count obs.fr. exp.fr. run            count obs.fr. exp.fr. run
  ----- ------- ------- -------------  ----- ------- ------- -------------
   3660 0.28344 0.28135 0               3434 0.26593 0.27477 1          
   1559 0.12073 0.12403 00              1443 0.11175 0.12630 11         
    726 0.05622 0.05382 000              754 0.05839 0.05716 111        
    346 0.02679 0.02285 0000             355 0.02749 0.02532 1111       
    129 0.00999 0.00948 00000            180 0.01394 0.01095 11111      
     60 0.00465 0.00383 000000            94 0.00728 0.00462 111111     
     32 0.00248 0.00151 0000000           46 0.00356 0.00191 1111111    
     18 0.00139 0.00058 00000000          34 0.00263 0.00076 11111111   
     10 0.00077 0.00021 000000000         21 0.00163 0.00029 111111111  
      0 0.00000 0.00007 0000000000         7 0.00054 0.00010 1111111111 
      2 0.00015 0.00002 00000000000        1 0.00008 0.00003 11111111111
      1 0.00008 0.00001 000000000000                 
      1 0.00008 0.00000 0000000000000                 

These counts are derived from the whole text (minus labels), majority
version. All lines with unreadable or contentious characters were
discarded, leaving 3042 usable lines.

Each "1" means a word with one or more gallows, "0" a word with none.
Each entry above gives the count of maximal runs of 0's or 1's.
Runs were not allowed to extend across line breaks. The sample
contains 11850 "0"s (prob = 0.490) and 12330 "1"s (prob = 0.510).

The column "obs.fr." is the relative observed frequency of each run,
and "exp.fr." is its expected frequency, computed for a random string
of "0"s and "1"s with the same 0-1 bit probabilities, and same
distribution of line lengths (mean 7.94 words, mode 10 words).


As you can see, the observed distribution of run lengths is quite
close to that of random text. I.e., contrary to my claims, there is NO
significant correlation between the gallows bit of consecutive words.

The run-length statistics for individual sections show the same story.
I tried excluding short lines, and excluding the first and last run of
each line; still no correlation.

Sigh. It seems that I was stupidly fooled by a banal optical illusion.
Looking at the bit strings, the long runs of 0's and 1's are more
conspicuous than the short runs, and thus seem to be anomalously
common; but the cold statistics show that it ain't so.

So, my apologies to everyone for the false claim, and for the
(probably) irrelevant postings about Turkish linguistics. I will try
to be more careful in the future...

(There is one bright side to it, though --- the Chinese theory 
is not dead after all!)

All the best,

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 21 07:16:49 2000
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From: Adams Douglas <adamsd@cts.com>
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Subject: Re: Gallows bit sequences: how embarassing...
To: stolfi@ic.unicamp.br
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 04:16:14 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <200009210912.e8L9CTm25672@coruja.dcc.unicamp.br> from "Jorge Stolfi" at Sep 21, 2000 06:12:29 AM
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Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> 
> So, my apologies to everyone for the false claim, and for the
> (probably) irrelevant postings about Turkish linguistics. I will try
> to be more careful in the future...
> 
> (There is one bright side to it, though --- the Chinese theory 
> is not dead after all!)

Another is a wonderful demonstration of the Scientific Method at work.

Thanks and congratulations, Jorge, you've truly discovered a new fact about
the VMs, just because it's a "negative" fact doesn't make it any less
significant. We know this is one aspect we don't have to waste effort on
now.

-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 Sep 21 17:01:29 2000
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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Count of words with gallows, mantle, and "ed"
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For the record, here are some additional word statistics per section.  

In all cases, the input data is the majority-vote text derived from
the EVA interlinear transcription, after discarding all lines that
contain unreadable characters or stalemates (characters without
absolute majority agreement).

Labels were collected in the pseudo-section "lab.n", and excluded
from all other sections. The pseudo-section "txt.n" is the union of all 
the others, labels excluded. 

Some traditional sections were split in two or more subsections,
to highlight their dispersion within the manuscript.  The herbal
sections were split also according to Currier's A/B subsets. 
Sections "unk.1" to "unk.8" are isolated pages or folios 
with uncertain classification.

The "count" columns give the number of tokens (word instances)
without and with the feature in question.  The "freq." columns give
the corresponding frequencies, relative to the section's total.
In each table, the sections are separated into "large" (> 500 tokens)
and "small" (< 500 tokens), and each group is sorted by the 
with:without ratio.

First, the token counts for PRESENCE OF CORE LETTERS 
(a.k.a. "gallows letters" - EVA {k,t,p,f},
possibly with <c-h> or <i-h> pedestal)

           WITHOUT      WITH
         -----------  -----------
  sect.  count freq.  count freq.  pages
  -----  ----- -----  ----- -----  ---------------------------
  txt.n  11850 0.490  12330 0.510  text(all)
  lab.n    372 0.384    596 0.616  labels(all)

  pha.1    304 0.588    213 0.412  f88r-f89v1
  hea.2    322 0.529    287 0.471  f87r-f87v,f90r1-f90v1,f93r-f93v,f96r-f96v
  hea.1   3112 0.525   2819 0.475  f1v-f49r(A),f51r-f56v(A)
  pha.2    376 0.523    343 0.477  f99r-f102v1
  bio.1   2450 0.510   2350 0.490  f75r-f84v
  cos.2    318 0.502    316 0.498  f67r1-f70r2
  heb.1   1047 0.459   1234 0.541  f26r-f48v(A),f50r-f57r(B),f66v
  str.2   3043 0.444   3803 0.556  f103r-f108v,f111r-f116r

  cos.1     21 0.656     11 0.344  f57v
  unk.2     66 0.550     54 0.450  f49v
  unk.1     76 0.535     66 0.465  f1r
  cos.3    118 0.529    105 0.471  f85r2-f86v4,f85v2,f86v3
  str.1    159 0.485    169 0.515  f58r-f58v
  unk.5     62 0.470     70 0.530  f85r1
  unk.4    115 0.469    130 0.531  f66r
  unk.6     49 0.430     65 0.570  f86v6
  unk.7     62 0.425     84 0.575  f86v5
  zod.1     19 0.422     26 0.578  f70v2-f73v
  heb.2    121 0.420    167 0.580  f94r-f95v1
  unk.3     10 0.357     18 0.643  f65r-f65v
  unk.8      0 0.000      0 0.000  f116v

Here are the statistics for PRESENCE OF MANTLE LETTERS. These are the
EVA letters <sh> and <ch> (a.k.a. "tables" or "chairs"), plus some
relatively rare groups that seem to be variants or misreadings of the
same (chiefly <ee>, and a few <se>, <es>, and single <e> not following
another core or mantle letter.)

The <c-h> and <c-he> gallows pedestals were NOT counted as mantle letters.
(With this convention, there seems to be practically no correlation
between the number of core letters and the number of mantle letters
in the word.  If gallows platforms are counted as mantle letters,
there seems to be a small positive correlation between the two counts.
Obviously I do not know which one (if any) is the "correct" choice.)

           WITHOUT      WITH
         -----------  -----------
  sect.  count freq.  count freq.  pages
  -----  ----- -----  ----- -----  ---------------------------
  txt.n  12200 0.505  11980 0.495  text(all)
  lab.n    652 0.674    316 0.326  labels(all)

  heb.1   1309 0.574    972 0.426  f26r-f48v(A),f50r-f57r(B),f66v
  pha.1    290 0.561    227 0.439  f88r-f89v1
  pha.2    395 0.549    324 0.451  f99r-f102v1
  bio.1   2540 0.529   2260 0.471  f75r-f84v
  cos.2    329 0.519    305 0.481  f67r1-f70r2
  hea.2    304 0.499    305 0.501  f87r-f87v,f90r1-f90v1,f93r-f93v,f96r-f96v
  hea.1   2803 0.473   3128 0.527  f1v-f49r(A),f51r-f56v(A)
  str.2   3218 0.470   3628 0.530  f103r-f108v,f111r-f116r

  cos.1     23 0.719      9 0.281  f57v
  unk.7     94 0.644     52 0.356  f86v5
  unk.3     18 0.643     10 0.357  f65r-f65v
  str.1    204 0.622    124 0.378  f58r-f58v
  unk.1     85 0.599     57 0.401  f1r
  unk.6     67 0.588     47 0.412  f86v6
  heb.2    165 0.573    123 0.427  f94r-f95v1
  cos.3    115 0.516    108 0.484  f85r2-f86v4,f85v2,f86v3
  unk.5     65 0.492     67 0.508  f85r1
  unk.4    120 0.490    125 0.510  f66r
  zod.1     22 0.489     23 0.511  f70v2-f73v
  unk.2     34 0.283     86 0.717  f49v
  unk.8      0 0.000      0 0.000  f116v

Finally, the statistics for the ED-GROUP (EVA <ed>)
which Rene proposed as an indicator of "language evolution": 

  txt.n  21235 0.859   3499 0.141  text(all)
  lab.n    917 0.939     60 0.061  labels(all)
  
  hea.1   5925 0.999      6 0.001  f1v-f49r(A),f51r-f56v(A)
  hea.2    607 0.997      2 0.003  f87r-f87v,f90r1-f90v1,f93r-f93v,f96r-f96v
  pha.2    717 0.997      2 0.003  f99r-f102v1
  pha.1    512 0.990      5 0.010  f88r-f89v1
  cos.2    622 0.981     12 0.019  f67r1-f70r2
  heb.1   1957 0.835    387 0.165  f26r-f48v(A),f50r-f57r(B),f66v
  str.2   5653 0.793   1476 0.207  f103r-f108v,f111r-f116r
  bio.1   3505 0.708   1444 0.292  f75r-f84v
  
  unk.1    142 1.000      0 0.000  f1r
  unk.2    120 1.000      0 0.000  f49v
  str.1    333 0.988      4 0.012  f58r-f58v
  zod.1     44 0.978      1 0.022  f70v2-f73v
  unk.3     27 0.964      1 0.036  f65r-f65v
  unk.7    146 0.954      7 0.046  f86v5
  cos.1     29 0.906      3 0.094  f57v
  heb.2    263 0.889     33 0.111  f94r-f95v1
  unk.6    111 0.874     16 0.126  f86v6
  cos.3    199 0.869     30 0.131  f85r2-f86v4,f85v2,f86v3
  unk.4    208 0.849     37 0.151  f66r
  unk.5    115 0.777     33 0.223  f85r1
  unk.8      0 0.000      0 0.000  f116v

CAVE ASINUM - do not trust my statistics blindly! 
I have been known to make mistakes occasionally 8-/

All the best,

--stolfi


From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 21 17:08:36 2000
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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
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Subject: Re: Count of words with gallows, mantle, and "ed"
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    >   heb.1  ...  f26r-f48v(A),f50r-f57r(B),f66v
                             ^^^
Oops, that should be f26r-f48v(B), of course.

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 21 20:54:01 2000
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Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 19:54:00 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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Gabriel Landini wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> I cam across this page
> 
> http://www.zompist.com/numbers.shtml
> 
> I did not have an idea of the number of known artificial languages
> there are...
> 
> http://www.zompist.com/last.htm#conlang

	Egad, they even have Reimann (Reiman is my mother's
maiden name).  I don't see any of Jacques'...

	I do see Talossan.  For more details:

Talossan Language Home Page
http://www.execpc.com/~talossa/glhetg.html

Talossan is spoken in:

The Kingdom of Talossa: an Independent, Sovereign
Country
http://www.execpc.com/~talossa/

	You can see much more of this sort of thing at;

Model Countries and Micronations
http://www.angelfire.com/nv/micronations/micros.html

	I used to get mail from the Frstentum of
CASTELLANIA.  They are a group claiming descent from
the Knights Templar.  They declared a non-territorial
independent state, headed by King Ralph I.  They
colonized an unspecified island with Southeast Asian
refugees, but they found out that no established nation
would leave them alone (translation:  every independent
territorial nation had better have armed forces).  They
freely issued passports for a while, then found that
people were using them to establish false identities;
they did not intend to be a "document oasis".  So
Castellanian citizenship cost a "donation" of ~US$
10,000 for a while.  I don't know where matters stand
currently.

	We really need a good Knights Templar theory for the
VMs...

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 21 22:34:09 2000
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Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 02:35:46 +0000
From: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
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Dennis wrote:
 
>         Egad, they even have Reimann (Reiman is my mother's
> maiden name).  I don't see any of Jacques'...


One of  them is here:

http://members.aol.com/limako/vortpunoj3.html

The others are mostly (cross fingers) somewhere
on my hard disk ... disk of Phaistos?

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep 22 19:41:44 2000
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	Interesting site on parchment, pigments, etc.

Le Parchemin (Parchment)
http://oddie.free.fr/parchemin/

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep 22 19:56:21 2000
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From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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	Another interesting site on medieval manuscript
fabrication.   In French and Portuguese, but not yet in
English

http://www.citeweb.net/pecalli/

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From: Claus_Anders@t-online.de (Claus Anders)
To: <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: WG: average word length in VMS
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 19:30:02 +0200
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> Dear all,
> to compute the "real" word length (as opposite to token length), I wrote a
> small awk-script to compile all char. combinations of the VMS - ignoring
> the token break char. The ouput was reduced to "words" with frequency > 4.
> And only up to folio 101 because my computer became quite slow because the
> needed memory (more than 600 MB). The processing for 1 line was inscreased
> to 1 hour and became expon. bigger with everex next line. 
> The result:
> # of different words with frq. > 4		:	20603 
> average word length of these words	: 	6.88861
> Most of the words differ only in the endings (maybe declinations or
> conjugations).
> It seems, these numbers are more similar to known laguages than the number
> coputed for tokens:
> The next step will looking at the roots of all these words to produce a
> kind of vocabulary.
> Any hints for extracting a root-word out this (like Jorge's
> mantle/crust/core)?
> Claus
> PS words in this context are clusters of characsters within one VMS line
> ignoring token/line/par breaks.

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From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep 23 20:23:56 2000
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From: "Ronald L. Carter" <rcarter@chisp.net>
To: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>, <voynich@rand.org>
References: <BBB0694EA12CD311B2F300508B2C1DFA01BD5EB1@acnt07.ac1.dsh.de>
Subject: Re: Latin abbreviations (in VMS?)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 18:21:33 -0600
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Well, I (long from posting, but not from lurking) was
one of the people that has been looking at the concept
that there is a form of Latin abbreviations used in the
VMs; the main book I looked at was:

Adriano Cappelli
The Elements of Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography.
Lawrence, Kan: University of Kansas Library, 1982.

It would be interesting to have Mr. Cappelli take a look
at the VMs.  I ( a few years ago now...) did place a call
to an associate of Mr. Cappelli and at that time he was on
sabbatical.  Never followed up.

As for an online resources, I can check further; searching
http://www.alltheweb.com with the keywords of:

Abbreviation Medieval Latin Paleography

returned some 76 hits, so maybe there is something out there.

Ron Carter - rcarter@chisp.net - Denver, Colorado US

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: <voynich@rand.org>
Sent: Wednesday, 2000, September, 13 6:37 AM
Subject: Latin abbreviations (in VMS?)



Dear all,
I'm just wading through the past mailing lists and stumbled over some latin
abbreviations vs. VMS cipher.
Does anybody know of an online resource to a list of such latin abbr. ?
(I found a program acting as a dictionary, but it will cost 48 EUR, to much
for just curious evaluation).
Thanx
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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Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 22:22:54 -1000
From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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Subject: Re: WG: average word length in VMS
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Claus Anders wrote:

> > The next step will looking at the roots of all these words to produce a
> > kind of vocabulary.
> > Any hints for extracting a root-word out this (like Jorge's
> > mantle/crust/core)?
> > Claus

Sounds interesting, I don't even have time to look at it right
now, I'm bogged down in learning Linux so I can get in and play,
too.  For extracting roots, I considered several different
mathematical ways to do it, but what I finally decided that I
would do first is just sort the list in alphabetical order and
then scroll through the list and see what sticks out.  I'd also
reverse the order of characters in every word and sort that
alphabetically too. If you could make both of those lists into
spreadsheets with one character per cell you could pretty easily
follow up all kinds of hunches.  I'd say all endings should be
easy to find, except that I remember in formal writing being
confined to one tense, speaking in third person and using active
voice.  That makes the 'tion' at the end of words show up more
often than some regular verb endings. Whatever you use, you
might try it on a known language first, to see what you get. 
Try it with an ending heavy, yet somewhat irregular language
like Russian, a pretty regular language with endings like
German, and something not too ending intensive and irregular
like English.

Also, don't solve this thing before I get up to speed on my
BASHing and GAWKing!
Regards,
Brian

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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: WG: average word length in VMS
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    > [Claus Anders] to compute the "real" word length (as opposite to
    > token length), I wrote a small awk-script to compile all char.
    > combinations of the VMS - ignoring the token break char. [...]
    > PS words in this context are clusters of characsters within one
    > VMS line ignoring token/line/par breaks.
    
I don't quite understand what you mean. Are your words the same thing
as our words (i.e. strings of non-break characters delimited by
breaks)? Or do you discard the break characters and then take all
possible substrings of each line (i.e. from column i to column j, for
all pairs 1 <= i < j <= n)?

    > The result:
    > # of different words with frq. > 4 : 20603 
    > average word length of these words : 6.88861

Does the latter take into account the frequency of each word? Or is it
the mean length of the *set* of distinct words, without regards to
their frequencies?
    
    > The ouput was reduced to "words" with frequency > 4. And only up
    > to folio 101 because my computer became quite slow because the
    > needed memory (more than 600 MB). The processing for 1 line was
    > inscreased to 1 hour and became expon. bigger with everex next
    > line.

What computing system do you use (Windows, Unix)?  If it is Unix,
I may be able to help you to make your program faster.

    > Any hints for extracting a root-word out this (like Jorge's
    > mantle/crust/core)?

One method is to build a finite automaton that recognizes the set of
those words, and then look for "important" states that are used by
many words. (In fact, my debut as Voynichologist was applying this
technique to the list of standard (space-delimited) VMs words. It did
reveal some roots/suffix "declinations", but unfortunately they had
all been noticed before.)

As for the core/mantle/crust stuff, I didn't use any special method.
>From poring at the digraph and trigraph frequencies I eventually got
convinced that the <e>s were modifying suffixes for a certain subset
of the symbols (gallows and tables), and the [aoy] seemed to be
inserted at specific positions within the word. So I deleted the
[aoy], regrouped the remaining symbos into X/Xe "letters", and again
looked at their digraph and trigraph frequencies. At that level, the
three-layer structure wasn't hard to see.

All the best,

--stolfi

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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Latest on Hamptonese
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Hi Dennis,

Hamptonese is indeed a fascinating puzzle!

I am a bit skeptical about the "African writing" connection. From the
material you have gathered, my impression is that Hampton would hardly
have had a chance to know about those writing systems; and, even if he
did, I doubt whether he would associate those "pagan" scripts with his
Christian beliefs.

    > Hampton repeated the syllables "nuh" and "tuh" a lot, but even
    > if you pull those out as nulls, it's still mumbo-jumbo ...

I can't see Hampton using devious tricks like nulls in his writing. In
my mind, he must have been more concerned with aesthetical or mystical
qualities of the script (including historical or logical consistency,
as he perceived them) than with secrecy per se.

He may also have invented the script to get around his apparent
difficulty with English spelling, and/or as a kind of shorthand. 

    > Here are corresponding positions on two tables of
    > the 10 Commandments:

These commandments seem awfully short. Could it be a syllabic script,
or a logographic system?

Anyway, the correspondence between the two lists argues strongly
against the "glossolalia" theory.  These symbols must have been
perfectly meaningful to James!

I tried pairing the two lists (in your original transcription
alphabet) according to the their similarity:

[ warning - longish lines, fixed-width font required ]


  page p10               page p9            Dennis's 
  ---------------------  -----------------  tentative
  J-num  line  text      line  text         "translation"
  -----  ----  --------  ----  -----------  --------------
    ---  top   viD       top   viD(?)     

      I  2     kUlh      2L    kUvh       
     II  3     wphDv     3L    wphxv      
    III  4     Thrjv     ---   ------     
     IV  5     Tfvyv     4L    fvyv       
      V  6     Thpvdo    5L    khpv{?}do  
     VI  7     Tkwddv    6L    cdddv{?}     I   no other gods      
    VII  8     Twwkvp    7L    wwkpv        II  no graven image    
   VIII  9     Tnrrrvp   8L    cnrrrvp      III no name of God in vain
     IX  10    chpkp     9L    whpkp        IV  remember the Sabbath 
    ---  ---   -----     10L   fvyv         V   honor father & mother

      X  11    wsodnp    2R    ksodny{?}p 
     XI  12    kjgvhs    3R    udvhs      
    XII  13    uJhos     4R    khos       
   XIII  14    Tjvso     5R    jvso       
    XIV  15    Tmolv     6R    molv         VI   no murder      
     XV  16    Tyygosv   7R    yyd{?}osv    VII  no adultery    
    XVI  17    Tnvgv     8R    Dvgv         VIII don't steal    
   XVII  18    Tgyonv    9R    KgcoYv       IX   no false witness
  XVIII  19    kgyol     10R   Ugccol       X    don't covet  
    XIX  20    khDvp     bot   UhDvp      

    ---- 21    viD       ---   ---          

I don't quite know what to make of the omission of commandment J-III
on p9, and the duplication of J-IV at the bottom of the left column.
Perhaps James made a mistake while writng p9, or he was still
searching for the "right" ordering and layout of the commandments.
Page p10 would then be a clean(er) copy of p9. Or perhaps J-III is the
"last commandment" that is mentioned elsewhere in his biography, and
it hadn't been revealed yet when he wrote p9?

I presume that your tentative matching of the Old Testament
commandments with James's list was based on the roman numerals in p9.
To me, those numerals seem merely decorative, and do not seem to match
the Hamptonese lines. However, your pairing has a curious feature: all
of the "negative" commandments, except one, start with a "T" in the p10
list (which is absent in p9).

Even if the pairing is not quite right, it may be that "T" stands
for "not", "don't", "thou shall not", etc.  That would fit with 
p9 being a working draft:

   p9               p10
   murder           don't murder
   other gods       no other gods
   stealing         don't steal
   
There are many possible variations on this idea, of course.
Another possibility is that Hamptonese evolved somewhat
between p9 and p10 (hm, where did I read that before? 8-)
   
Also, line <p10:9> (OT Commandment III) contains an "rrr" combination,
and your comments seem to say that "rrr" is rare elsewhere; and line
<p10:7> (OT Commandment I) has "ddd". Could it be that "rrr" = God,
"ddd" = gods?

The English on page 9 says "The Old and the New Covenant Recorded by
St. James". Considering the roman numerals on p10, it looks as if
James's "Commandments" list was some personal revelation, with 19
entries, presumably combining the Old Testament ten with nine new ones.

>From the New Testament he may have got "Love thy neighbor..." and "Do
unto others...". What could be the other seven? 

(From my Sunday School days I vaguely recall that the Catholic Church
has an extra seven Commandments, which I confess I don't remember any
more. But James came from a Baptist family; does the Baptist Church
have its seven Commandments, too? Or are his signing as "St. James"
and his references to the Virgin Mary hints of Catholic influence in
his beliefs?)

All the best, and all the good luck,

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sun Sep 24 14:39:47 2000
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From: Claus_Anders@t-online.de (Claus Anders)
To: <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
Cc: <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: AW: WG: average word length in VMS
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 20:41:19 +0200
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Hi Jorge,
you wrote:
>I don't quite understand what you mean. Are your words the same thing
>as our words (i.e. strings of non-break characters delimited by
>breaks)? Or do you discard the break characters and then take all
>possible substrings of each line (i.e. from column i to column j, for
>all pairs 1 <= i < j <= n)?
by words I meant all character combinations in a line discarding the breaks
(=> all possible substrings). Yes, I used the frequency of such substrings,
so the result is a weighted word length.
My machine is a windows based machine, but - if necessary - I could break
the VMS into several parts and then compute the numbers.The first step was
only for curiosity- what if the "breaks" are no breaks at all, but something
completly different.
Today I computed the numbers for possible endings (from the above result as
a wordlist) a got the following numbers:

suffix  norm. number of 	result 	   rejected words
length  poss. suff.		= unique words length < suffix length -1
-------------------------------------------------------------------
2	    19  			7617		   237
3	   102			4877		  1035
4	   281                  3081		  2949
5        289                  1901          6212
6	   224			1201         10067
7         64			 802         13487

The sum of unique words and rejections should be the number of words in the
VMS vocabulary. 
(the complete list had 20605 different words). As a intuitive result I would
conclude the mean suffix length in Voynichese (if there is such thing as
suffix) could be 3 (minimum vocabulary).
To  normalize the suffix count I looked at the first length-1 char of the
suffix and counted only these substrings. The last char was always a similar
string of single chars like:
ai c i l m n r
al a c d k l o q r s t y
am a c d o q s y		// i.e. possible endings are ama amc amd amo
amq ams and amy
ar a c d e i k l o q s y
ch a c d e i k l o p r s t y
da i k l m n o r s
de d e y
dk a e s
do a c d i k l m r t
dy a c d e f k l o p q r s t y
ea d i l m r s y
ec h k t
ed a c e l o q s y
ee a c d e k n o r s t y
ef a c y
ek a c e o s y
eo a c d e k l m o p q r s t y
ep a c y
es a c d e h o q s y
et a c e s y
.........
My method isn't very orthodox but I'm somehow convinced that there is a kind
of finer/inner structure to Voynichese and there are words and the breaks
have a special, functional meaning.
Cheers
Claus

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Ag==

------=_NextPart_000_0000_01C02667.CAF31870--

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep 25 10:59:31 2000
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	Thanks a million, Jorge, for looking at the Hamptonese
problem!  I need all the help I can get! 

Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> 
> I am a bit skeptical about the "African writing" connection. From the
> material you have gathered, my impression is that Hampton would hardly
> have had a chance to know about those writing systems; and, even if he
> did, I doubt whether he would associate those "pagan" scripts with his
> Christian beliefs.

	I've found one article on Afro-American "spirit
writing".  It wasn't very helpful in itself, but it has
a bibliography that might have what I need.  The
article implied that Afro-American "spirit writing" is
based on African writing systems like those at the
links I gave and that current practitioners might not
remember their pagan origins.  In any case, none of the
African writing systems really look like Hamptonese.  I
really need to discuss this with Lynda Hartigan

>     > Hampton repeated the syllables "nuh" and "tuh" a lot, but even
>     > if you pull those out as nulls, it's still mumbo-jumbo ...
> 
> I can't see Hampton using devious tricks like nulls in his writing. In
> my mind, he must have been more concerned with aesthetical or mystical
> qualities of the script (including historical or logical consistency,
> as he perceived them) than with secrecy per se.

	I agree.  Hampton may have thought that the syllables
nu and tu have mystical significance, and therefore
repeated them at times, perhaps like an incantation.

> He may also have invented the script to get around his apparent
> difficulty with English spelling, and/or as a kind of shorthand.

	That would accord with the "phonetic" hypothesis I'm
currently using.  The 14 vowels and 17 consonants that
I see in Hamptonese accords fairly well with the 12
vowels and 23 consonants that I see in phonemic
English, much better than it accords with  standard
English orthography or a Malayo-Polynesian language
like Chamorro.  I also think that Hampton thought that
his script had mystical significance.  Every piece of
his Throne is labeled both in English and Hamptonese.  

>     > Here are corresponding positions on two tables of
>     > the 10 Commandments:
> 
> These commandments seem awfully short. Could it be a syllabic script,
> or a logographic system?

	I doubt either.  I currently recognize 31 characters. 
The most common consonant y has two variants that might
in fact be separate letters/phonemes (sound
familiar?).  I also have seen a few more characters in
text that I haven't yet transcribed.  However, I doubt
that the real total reaches 40.  That doesn't indicate
either a syllabic or a logographic script.  

	With the Ten Commandments, I thought that his
equivalents are single words, perhaps mnemonic.  

> Anyway, the correspondence between the two lists argues strongly
> against the "glossolalia" theory.  These symbols must have been
> perfectly meaningful to James!

	I agree.  He also has recognizable words in the pure
text.  My next steps will probably be:

1)  Build much larger corpora of both Hamptonese and
phonemic English.
2)  Go through and break out the easily visible tokens
with hyphens.  
3)  Use Son of Glotto to identify the larger tokens
made up of smaller ones.
4)  Use TACT and Son of Glotto to look for patterns of
the tokens.

> I tried pairing the two lists (in your original transcription
> alphabet) according to the their similarity:
> 
> [ warning - longish lines, fixed-width font required ]
> 
>   page p10               page p9            Dennis's
>   ---------------------  -----------------  tentative
>   J-num  line  text      line  text         "translation"
>   -----  ----  --------  ----  -----------  --------------
>     ---  top   viD       top   viD(?)
> 
>       I  2     kUlh      2L    kUvh
>      II  3     wphDv     3L    wphxv
>     III  4     Thrjv     ---   ------
>      IV  5     Tfvyv     4L    fvyv
>       V  6     Thpvdo    5L    khpv{?}do
>      VI  7     Tkwddv    6L    cdddv{?}     I   no other gods
>     VII  8     Twwkvp    7L    wwkpv        II  no graven image
>    VIII  9     Tnrrrvp   8L    cnrrrvp      III no name of God in vain
>      IX  10    chpkp     9L    whpkp        IV  remember the Sabbath
>     ---  ---   -----     10L   fvyv         V   honor father & mother
> 
>       X  11    wsodnp    2R    ksodny{?}p
>      XI  12    kjgvhs    3R    udvhs
>     XII  13    uJhos     4R    khos
>    XIII  14    Tjvso     5R    jvso
>     XIV  15    Tmolv     6R    molv         VI   no murder
>      XV  16    Tyygosv   7R    yyd{?}osv    VII  no adultery
>     XVI  17    Tnvgv     8R    Dvgv         VIII don't steal
>    XVII  18    Tgyonv    9R    KgcoYv       IX   no false witness
>   XVIII  19    kgyol     10R   Ugccol       X    don't covet
>     XIX  20    khDvp     bot   UhDvp
> 
>     ---- 21    viD       ---   ---
> 
> Or perhaps J-III is the
> "last commandment" that is mentioned elsewhere in his biography, and
> it hadn't been revealed yet when he wrote p9?

	I don't remember a "last commandment".  Where did you
see that?

> I presume that your tentative matching of the Old Testament
> commandments with James's list was based on the roman numerals in p9.
> To me, those numerals seem merely decorative, and do not seem to match
> the Hamptonese lines. However, your pairing has a curious feature: all
> of the "negative" commandments, except one, start with a "T" in the p10
> list (which is absent in p9).

	I agree, on p10 the numerals are decorative, and the
"T" is some sort of ordering character.  I didn't
notice the thing about the "negative" commandments.

> Also, line <p10:9> (OT Commandment III) contains an "rrr" combination,
> and your comments seem to say that "rrr" is rare elsewhere; and line
> <p10:7> (OT Commandment I) has "ddd". Could it be that "rrr" = God,
> "ddd" = gods?

	Could be, but one of the remarkable things about
Hamptonese is the way in which repeated characters
constitute a single unit, as rr does.  That would make
it less likely that he would write a unit within a word
to indicate the plural.

> The English on page 9 says "The Old and the New Covenant Recorded by
> St. James". Considering the roman numerals on p10, it looks as if
> James's "Commandments" list was some personal revelation, with 19
> entries, presumably combining the Old Testament ten with nine new ones.

	Good thought.
 
> (From my Sunday School days I vaguely recall that the Catholic Church
> has an extra seven Commandments, which I confess I don't remember any
> more. But James came from a Baptist family; does the Baptist Church
> have its seven Commandments, too? Or are his signing as "St. James"
> and his references to the Virgin Mary hints of Catholic influence in
> his beliefs?)

	Where do you see a reference to the Virgin Mary?  The
Catholic Church does have the "seven deadly sins" -
greed, gluttony, rage... I don't remember them. 
They're not usually mentioned in the Protestant
churches, but individual pastors may discuss them. 
Hampton never joined a church in Washington DC, and his
beliefs were probably highly idiosyncratic.  Your ideas
are entirely plausible.  

	However, I feel sure that he had precedents that I've
not yet found.

Thanks a million, Jorge,
Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep 25 11:01:16 2000
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From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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	I have some thoughts on the "unicity distance" concept
several people mentioned to me.  This is the length of
a string in a language/orthography/cipher system that
has one, unique plaintext.  We currently know of no way
to prove that the VMs is gibberish or that there is
insufficient material for decipherment.  A modified
"unicity distance" might provide us those things.

	At first glance it seemed unlikely.  One link noted
that the unicity distance is usually quite short,
rarely exceeding 60-70 characters, since natural
languages are highly redundant.  However, consider this
example:

JIWEN LIU's Home Page
http://www2.ics.hawaii.edu/~jiwen/ics623/ics623.html

	Step 1) Suppose that the unicity distance = n bytes;
	Step 2) H = 1.5 bits/per letter;
		Hence The number of messages that might be accepted
2^(n*H)
	Step 3) Suppose that The Plain English cleattext is 
		little characters: 'a'~'z' plus blank, 27
		Hence, the possible message: 27^n
	Step 4) The key: 27!
	Step 5) Upon the formular:
		1 = 27! *2^(1.5*n)/27^n
		log27!+1.5*n*log2-n*log27=0
		n = 28.61
	Step 6) The unicity distance = 28.61 bytes

	This treatment of unicity distance seems to say that
you could have any distribution of characters within a
token - definitely not true in natural languages! 
Natural languages don't work like this. In natural
languages are such constraints within words/tokens as:

1)  Vowel/consonant alternation.

2)  Syllabic constraints.  Japanese is an extreme
example.  In Japanese a syllable may have:
	a) Zero or one of 17 consonants,
	b) One of 10 vowels (remember long/short), and
	c) One of 
		i)   Zero phonemes,
		ii)  -n, or
		iii) the double of a stop (at most one of 6)
beginning the next syllable.

3)  Permitted but not seen.  Even in a grid like one
might draw for Japanese kana (syllables), not all
permitted combinations actually occur.  The same is
true of the various proposed Voynichese word paradigms.

4)  Other types of phonotactic and graphotactic
constraints.  In English #sht- is impossible but in
High German it is common.  The same "permitted but not
seen" applies here too.

5) Rules of word formation.   There are derivational
and inflectional prefixes, infixes, and suffixes. 
Compound words are formed from smaller ones.  

	Beyond constraints within words, a phenomenon
extensively studied for Voynichese, rules of syntax
determine permissible word sequences in a given natural
language.  The definition of unicity distance takes
none of this into account.  If one wants to define *the
minimum text size needed for a single, unambiguous
decipherment*, somehow one must include all these
constraints.  

	Perhaps one could define a modified unicity distance
that means the minimum size of a text that has one
plaintext in a given language.  Since the word
structure of Voynichese has been extensively studied,
we could calculate a modified unicity distance for
Voynichese that does not include the effect of syntax. 
If we ever study the syntax of Voynichese, we could
include that too.  But I'd have to think about this a
lot more to have any idea on how to do it. 

	The floor is open, especially to those who know a lot
more about these matters than I do.

Dennis

From reeds Mon Sep 25 20:06:25 2000
From: reeds@fry.research.att.com (Jim Reeds)
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Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 20:06:25 -0400
In-Reply-To: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
        "Is the VMs Undecipherable?" (Sep 25, 10:01)
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About unicity distance.  The usual examples apply to
classical ciphers, where there is a fixed key space, and
a more-or-less given plain text probability distribution.
And, of course, a definite algorithm for converting
plain into cipher, and back again, under the control of a 
key. 

To apply this to the VMS problem requies a stretch or 2,
as each of the features mentioned above are subject to question.
If the enciphering process involves a continual investment in
random choices on the part of the encipherer, one should
either abandon the idea of a fixed key space or should contemplate
adding an extra source of noise into the enciphering process.

Consider the following sort of "cipher": the encipherer is
entitled to randomly drop 1 vowel in 3 as she goes along, and
to randomly insert one extra consonant in 3; everything is then
subject to a simple substitution.  Do decipher involves deciding
which vowels to supply & which consonants to drop, as well as
in figuring out the unknown substitution alphabet.   A unicity
distance can be calculated for this situation, I suppose, but
the simplest formulas seen in hobby magazine articles -- like
mine -- will not work.

-- 
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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    > [Dennis:] I also think that Hampton thought that his script had
    > mystical significance. Every piece of his Throne is labeled both
    > in English and Hamptonese.

Those labels may be the Rosette stone! But surely that has been
tried before, and obviously it didn't work... But at least the labels
should put some constraints on the nature of the Hamptonese "code".

    > I currently recognize 31 characters. I also have seen a few more
    > characters in text that I haven't yet transcribed. However, I
    > doubt that the real total reaches 40. That doesn't indicate
    > either a syllabic or a logographic script.
    
That is a strong point. 

Hampton *could* conceivalbly have used a logographic system where each
word was encoded by 2 or 3 of what you consider to be single letters.
And/or, perhaps Hamptonese has a very small vocabulary and does not
record syntactic subtleties --- sort of a simplified Chinese,
specialized for commandments and revelations. However I agree that
these theories are stretching it...

On the other hand, it seems a bit unlikely that Hampton would develop
a truly phonetic alphabet with distinctive signs for 30+ sounds.
Instead, I would expect a system where the same symbol represents two
or three distinct phonemes, that are to be disambiguated by context
--- as in standard English spelling. (Only I would expect Hampton's
"spelling" to be more systematic than English).

    > The most common consonant y has two variants that might in fact
    > be separate letters/phonemes (sound familiar?).
  
I see that you also ignored the underlining in some characters--- cf.
e.g. the "l"s of <p10.2> and <p10.15>, and the "v"s of <p10.7> and
<p10.20>. If these details were taken into account, perhaps the total
would get close to the range of syllabic scripts. Japanese hiragana,
for eample, has about 50 symbols.

    > With the Ten Commandments, I thought that his
    > equivalents are single words, perhaps mnemonic.  

Perhaps, although they seem to have some structure that suggests a
syntax of sorts. For example, many of his 19 commandments begin "T",
and many end with "v" or "vp".

    > I don't remember a "last commandment". Where did you see that?
    
Sorry, I misremembered "10th" as "last" in the following bit (If I was
the VMs author, then you could easily guess that "daiin" meant "I"
and "dain" meant "sorry".)

  http://www.missioncreep.com/tilt/hampton.html

  Hampton's masterpiece was inspired by visions that persisted
  throughout his life. He recorded many of the visions on tablets
  that adorn the Throne. The first recorded vision took place when
  he was only 22-years-old: "This is true that the great Moses the
  giver of the tenth commandment appeared in Washington, D.C. April
  11, 1931." 

So my speculation that the commandment <Thrjv> may have been revealed
between p9 and p10 has nothing to stand upon...

    > ... Where do you see a reference to the Virgin Mary?
    
>From the same paragraph:

  http://www.missioncreep.com/tilt/hampton.html

  My favorite states that "...on October 2, 1946, the great Virgin
  Mary and the Star of Bethlehem appeared over the nation's capitol."

Also:

  http://www.clpgh.org/exhibit/throne.html

  the Virgin Mary descending [sic] into Heaven, November 2, 1950. It
  is also spoken of by Pope Pius XII." The Pope had proclaimed the
  Assumption of the Virgin as church dogma on that day.
    
BTW, the following bits from that page may be useful hints:

  http://www.clpgh.org/exhibit/throne.html

  Labels on [the throne] objects indicate that to the viewer's left
  (or, to the "right hand of God") the pieces refer to the New
  Testament, Jesus, and Grace. To the viewer's right, the system is
  based on the Old Testament, Moses, and Law.
  [...]
  Attached to many of the objects are labels with references to the
  Millennium and Revelation chapters 20 and 21, which describe the
  first Resurrection, the judgment of the dead before God, and the
  new heaven and earth. On one of the pieces Hampton wrote: "The
  word millennium means 'the return of Christ and part of the
  Kingdom of God on earth.'" Deeply affected by the Book of
  Revelation, Hampton must have believed in the inevitability of the
  Second Coming; he, in fact, told one friend that they were living
  in the last millennium. The Throne may have been built to ensure
  his personal salvation as well as to warn and instruct others. An
  adage found on his bulletin board is telling: "Where There Is No
  Vision The People Perish." Visionary experiences and the
  expectation of a Second Coming of Christ are not uncommon among
  the fundamentalist members of the black community, and Hampton's
  Baptist background is likely to have shaped his subsequent
  religious focus.
  [...]
  Intriguing parallels exist between certain details of the Book of
  Revelation and The Throne. When God showed Saint John the events of
  the Second Coming in a vision, he instructed John to record them in a
  little book in a cryptic language. Hampton may have believed that he
  had received a similarly portentous vision, for in addition to
  building The Throne, he developed an as yet undeciphered script and on
  the bottom of each page wrote "Revelation." Named as author of the
  book is Saint James, Hampton's chosen eponym, suggesting that although
  a humble man, he may, nonetheless, have fancied himself a holy figure
  or prophet like Saint John. The book may contain Hampton's translation
  of John's revelations, or, possibly, an entirely original religion
  based on his own vision. The script also appears on labels attached to
  each object, usually following an English word or phrase, suggesting a
  translation into his mysterious language. Composed of graceful
  characters resembling those of semitic or oriental languages, the
  script is the product of an uneducated man who printed his misspelled
  English words in childlike capital letters. It may indeed be inspired
  writing or it may be an artistic creation devoid of meaning.

  http://www.gadfly.org/1999-03/stjames.htm
  
  He also wrote a new book of Revelation. Like St. John's Revelation
  in the New Testament, recorded in a special language on the Isle of
  Patmos and scribbled onto parchment at the speed of a fever dream,
  St. James' Revelation was also a kind of stenography from God. On
  fire with the Spirit when he wrote, he recorded these messages in a
  spiral notebook.

(BTW, this last link is broken on your Hampton page -- I got it throuh
Google.  I am not sure I trust that page though --- some of the details
sound like they have been, um, interpolated for effect.)

    > The Catholic Church does have the "seven deadly sins" -
    > greed, gluttony, rage...
    
Right.

The "Church commandments" of my Sunday classes were actually five. It
seems that they were first compiled in the 15th century, never were an
"official" list, and varied between 5 an 10 depending on time and
place. From an old Catechism (Laurence Vaux, 1583):

  Celebrate and keep the Catholic holy days [in addition to Sabbath=Sunday].
  
  Attend mass every Sunday and holy day.
  
  Keep the fasting days and abstinence from meat as commanded by the Church.

  Confess all sins to a Priest at least once a year.
  
  Take Communion at least once a year.
  
Other versions of the list may have "Pay tithes", "Do not eat meat on
Fridays", "Do not marry close relatives", "Do not celebrate matrimony
on forbidden days", or specify Lent as a time for mandatory
confession.

There seems to be no explicit list of Church Commandments in the
present version of the Catholic Catechism (presumably a result of
Vatican II reform?)

In the New testament, Jesus recites five of the ten commandments:

  "You shall not murder," [OT VI.]
  "You shall not commit adultery;" [OT VII.] 
  "You shall not steal;" [OT VIII.]
  "You shall not bear false witness:" [OT IX.]
  "Honor your father and mother." [OT V.]
  
There seems to be a lot of theological writing, Christian and
non-Christian, about the question of why those five and not the other
five.
  
Elsewhere he is quoted giving two commandments that imply
all ten:
  
  "You shall love God with all your heart"
  "You shall love your neighbour as yourself"

Judaism identifies among the ten OT commandments a
subset of seven "Noachian Commandments", that 
were given to Noah. (A gentile who follows them is considered
righteous enough to join the kingdom of God in some sense). 

A [non-denominational?] site about the 10 commandments
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_10co.htm 
observes that "Literally read, the [Old Testament] Decalogue includes
19 different commands and prohibitions. If the text is further divided
into component parts, there are a total of 25 instructions."

All the best,

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 26 00:01:50 2000
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Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 23:02:02 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> 
>     > [Dennis:] I also think that Hampton thought that his script had
>     > mystical significance. Every piece of his Throne is labeled both
>     > in English and Hamptonese.
> 
> Those labels may be the Rosette stone! But surely that has been
> tried before, and obviously it didn't work... But at least the labels
> should put some constraints on the nature of the Hamptonese "code".

	I really don't know who has tried to decipher it or
how, so I'm not so sure that anyone tried using the
approach we use here in Team Voynich.  Even a crippie
might not think to try phonemic English.  I used just
the same techniques one would use to solve any simple
substitution cryptogram, although it felt like solving
one in a language I didn't know well.  The stats for
phonemic English are rather different from standard
English orthography.  

	As for a Rosetta Stone, Hampton has plenty of cribs. 
The tables of the Ten Commandments are just one
example.  He occasionally put some English words in a
Hamptonese text.  He has alternating paragraphs in
Hamptonese and English.  I agree, though, that it would
be a good idea to get some of the bilingual furniture
tags.
 
> Hampton *could* conceivalbly have used a logographic system where each
> word was encoded by 2 or 3 of what you consider to be single letters.

	A simple nomenclator?  That's possible.  However,
Hampton was not well educated, and the Hamptonese texts
are written in a flowing, easy manner -- just as the
VMs is.  So I doubt this.

> And/or, perhaps Hamptonese has a very small vocabulary and does not
> record syntactic subtleties --- sort of a simplified Chinese,
> specialized for commandments and revelations. However I agree that
> these theories are stretching it...

	That sounds like Levitov.  If this is some
Afro-American "spirit writing", that might well be
possible.

> On the other hand, it seems a bit unlikely that Hampton would develop
> a truly phonetic alphabet with distinctive signs for 30+ sounds.
> Instead, I would expect a system where the same symbol represents two
> or three distinct phonemes, that are to be disambiguated by context
> --- as in standard English spelling. (Only I would expect Hampton's
> "spelling" to be more systematic than English).

	I don't think that Hampton's spelling would be very
consistent.  Too, a phonemic writing system would lend
itself to the variation  of spoken English.  "The" in
English is usually pronounced "dhuh" but in formal
speech or for emphasis, it may be pronounced "dhI". 
Black people might pronounce it "duh".  There are
countless other examples.  

> I see that you also ignored the underlining in some characters--- cf.
> e.g. the "l"s of <p10.2> and <p10.15>, and the "v"s of <p10.7> and
> <p10.20>. 

	That passed my notice completely.  But even with that,
we might not have a syllabary.  The underlining could
indicate something comparable to the way Hawai'ian uses
the macron to indicate "long" vowels.  

>   Attend mass every Sunday and holy day.
> 
>   Keep the fasting days and abstinence from meat as commanded by the Church.
> 
>   Confess all sins to a Priest at least once a year.
> 
>   Take Communion at least once a year.

	Not having been raised a Catholic, I never heard of
these lists.  In *Perceval* by Chretien de Troyes a
priest tells Perceval, the simpleton, such a list. 
Obviously such lists have been around a long time.  In
his letters Paul recites several such lists.  The
scholars say that these were typical lists of household
virtues in the Hellenistic age.

> In the New testament, Jesus recites five of the ten commandments:
> 
>   "You shall not murder," [OT VI.]
>   "You shall not commit adultery;" [OT VII.]
>   "You shall not steal;" [OT VIII.]
>   "You shall not bear false witness:" [OT IX.]
>   "Honor your father and mother." [OT V.]
> 
> There seems to be a lot of theological writing, Christian and
> non-Christian, about the question of why those five and not the other
> five.

	Good question.  I read recently that Sabbath
observance was not practiced until after the Jews
returned from the Babylonian Exile.  Maybe the
Commandments weren't emphasized either.  

	The end of the Jewish War in 70 CE was a watershed in
Jewish history.  The Jewish leaders met at Javneh. 
They realized that Jewish worship could no longer
center on the now destroyed Temple.  Worship would have
to be in the household and at the synagogues.   The
Torah and other Jewish writings would provide
consistency.  Much of the nitpicking body of rules
undoubtedly entered Judaism after that decision.  

> Judaism identifies among the ten OT commandments a
> subset of seven "Noachian Commandments", that
> were given to Noah. (A gentile who follows them is considered
> righteous enough to join the kingdom of God in some sense).

<NITPICK>

	The Noachian commandments were not all drawn from the
10 Commandments.  I don't remember the details, but one
Noachian commandment was not to eat limbs torn from
living animals.  

</NITPICK>

> A [non-denominational?] site about the 10 commandments
> http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_10co.htm
> observes that "Literally read, the [Old Testament] Decalogue includes
> 19 different commands and prohibitions. If the text is further divided
> into component parts, there are a total of 25 instructions."

	Fortunately we have a lot of other cribs.  

	I'm starting that Hamptonese is like Helene Smith's
"Martian", except that Hampton used the phonemes of
modern.  I'll coin a term.  "Neoglossy" is both the act
of producing a hitherto unknown language in an altered
state of consciousness, and a word to denote the
language thus produced.  I've always thought that
Enochian is a neoglossy.  Kelley doesn't seem like the
sort of person who would write out a language of words
based on Elizabethian English, Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew, and then remember to produce it consistently. 
He wasn't that thorough and scholarly a person.  

	I suppose that those two neoglossy's will help some
with the decipherment of Hamptonese.  

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Mon Sep 25 13:03:25 2000
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Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 01:05:37 -0400
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Claus Anders wrote:

> > > Any hints for extracting a root-word out this (like Jorge's
> > mantle/crust/core)?
> > Claus

Though I never got it to work, it seems like you should be able to isolate
endings by:

1.    tabulating frequencies for all final strings of length 1, 2, 3, ...
2.    walking through each word from back to front, trying to find a spot where
the final string becomes
        much less frequent.

E.g. if the word is "SOLUTION" there would be lots ending in "-N", "-ON",
"-ION", "-TION"
but not too many ending in "-UTION".

Bruce

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 26 08:47:51 2000
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Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 02:46:55 -1000
From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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Bruce Grant wrote:
> 1.    tabulating frequencies for all final strings of length 1, 2, 3, ...
> 2.    walking through each word from back to front, trying to find a spot where
> the final string becomes
>         much less frequent.
> 
> E.g. if the word is "SOLUTION" there would be lots ending in "-N", "-ON",
> "-ION", "-TION"
> but not too many ending in "-UTION".

So how do we distinguish between 'tion' and a regular verb
inflection?  Finding lots of 'tion's in Voynich would most
likely not be much more than a red herring.  Consider languages
like English with those kind of endings, vs a language like
German with lots of compound words vs Chinese with all words
being compound...The facts needed to solve an unknown cipher
with an unknown language have not been developed yet.  Perhaps
we should apply some techniques to known languages.  There has
to be a more decisive way to fingerprint a language than entropy
vs avg. word length.  Again, in line with my idea to translate
the text into a different format, what if a relative value of
'phonosyntactic oddity' were assigned to each VMS token,
wouldn't we be able to see a pattern that reflected the
language's outside influences that would help ID it?  
Regards,
Brian

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Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 14:57:17 +0000
From: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
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Subject: Re: WG: average word length in VMS
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Brian Eric Farnell wrote:
>   There has
> to be a more decisive way to fingerprint a language than entropy
> vs avg. word length.

Letter frequency comes immediately to the mind.
(Why am I posting the obvious? My brain must have
gone soft -- next I am going to mention digraph
frequency and triumphantly add "and trigraphs  too!")

>  Again, in line with my idea to translate
> the text into a different format, what if a relative value of
> 'phonosyntactic oddity' were assigned to each VMS token,
> wouldn't we be able to see a pattern that reflected the
> language's outside influences that would help ID it?

Er... phonosyntactic oddity? You mean the way in which
the letters or groups of letters presumably representing
sounds combine together? Jorge Stolfi has done that and
he has come up with something which looks very much like
Chinese -- the infamous "Chinese hypothesis". It sure 
does look the spit and image of Chinese to me. The trouble
is: 

1. Assuming that it is Chinese, which variety of Chinese?
   There are dozen of varieties of Chinese, all really
   different languages, mutually unintelligible. Plus,
   four hundred years ago they were certainly rather
   different from what they are today.

2. It is not necessarily Chinese. My pet "serious" theory
   (no tongue in cheek for once) is an extinct language
   isolate, just like Basque, or Etruscan, but of course
   totally unrelated to either, and which happened to
   have a phonological  structure reminiscent of Chinese.
   I am persuaded that there were hundreds of such languages
   in Europe alone once. In other words, that the linguistic
   picture was very much like Papua New Guinea now. If you
   are after secrecy, it is a much better "cipher" than
   anything available at the time. A "Navaho code", as it were.

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 26 12:46:05 2000
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Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 11:45:45 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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Jacques Guy wrote:
> 
> Brian Eric Farnell wrote:
> >   There has
> > to be a more decisive way to fingerprint a language than entropy
> > vs avg. word length.

	To belabor one of my favorite points.  I think the
thing to do is to assume a language as a hypothesis and
then try to solve on that basis.  

	My current plan.  I assume that the underlying
language is medieval French and that the word divisions
are in fact syllable breaks, because:

1)  Spoken medieval and modern French do not have
distinct word divisions,

2)  If the "words" of Voynichese were in fact
syllables, that would explain the average short "word"
length; and

3)  Medieval French is historically plausible.  By 1480
it was the language of communication of the European
upper classes.  Marco Polo wrote (or his amanuensis
wrote) his travelogue in medieval French.

	I assume that the Voynich system is homophonic; i.e.,
it has several substitutes for the common syllables. 
The pieces of the Voynich word paradigm may well be
short words for mnemonic value.  

	(As I think about this, I wonder whether the Voynich
system is necessarily homophonic.  That would explain
the different statistics for A and B: a homophonic
system used by two different operators.  But we now
think that the difference between A and B may be
different subject matter, different authors' style, and
such.)

	Assuming for now that the system is homophonic.  H. F.
Gaines tells how to break homophonic systems.  While
there will be several choices for frequent syllables,
there will be only one for each *infrequent* syllable. 
So one looks for pattern words that include the
infrequent tokens.  This will be no easy matter.  

	There's a precedent for all this.  Louis XIV's Royal
Cipher worked just like this, and the late 19th century
crippie Etienne Bazeries solved it as I just described. 

> Letter frequency comes immediately to the mind.
> (Why am I posting the obvious? My brain must have
> gone soft -- next I am going to mention digraph
> frequency and triumphantly add "and trigraphs  too!")

	Just been there with Hamptonese, and it didn't work. 
That's how you solve a simple substitution cipher, but
both Hamptonese and Voynichese are more complex.

> Er... phonosyntactic oddity? You mean the way in which
> the letters or groups of letters presumably representing
> sounds combine together? Jorge Stolfi has done that and
> he has come up with something which looks very much like
> Chinese -- the infamous "Chinese hypothesis". It sure
> does look the spit and image of Chinese to me. 

	I increasingly agree.  Once again, make this a
hypothesis and try it.  Assume Cantonese or something
and see what happens.

>   If you
>    are after secrecy, it is a much better "cipher" than
>    anything available at the time. A "Navaho code", as it were.

	I can't resist.  I watched an episode of "The X-Files"
where Muldaur and Sculley were looking for secret
government files about contact with aliens.   These had
been leaked, much in the manner of the recent nuclear
secrets hard disk case in the USA.  The government
conspiracy wanted the UFO files back.  However, they
had originally been enciphered by the Navajo
code-talkers.  Their jargon for modern items, of
course, had never been put to paper, so the
code-talkers were the only ones who could ever decipher
the files. What's more, the secret files had made their
way to present-day Navajo, and several of them had
committed them to memory!  So secrecy was blown good
and properly.  The government definitely lost that
round.

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Tue Sep 26 22:11:47 2000
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    > Er... phonosyntactic oddity? You mean the way in which the
    > letters or groups of letters presumably representing sounds
    > combine together? Jorge Stolfi has done that and he has come up
    > with something which looks very much like Chinese -- the
    > infamous "Chinese hypothesis". It sure does look the spit and
    > image of Chinese to me.
    
Thanks Jacques for the lead.  Since you have been all bored to death
by my Chinese elucubrations, I guess that one more message can't make
things much worse.

I'll assume that you have read my pages about the
core-mantle-crust (KMC) word structure model,
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/00-06-07-word-grammar/

Gabriel and others have wondered whether similar structures could be
found in natural languages like Latin or English. I don't know how to
perform this "control experiment" meaningfully, since I didn't use any
algorithm to extract the structure.  I just kept poring at the
statistics and tweaking the grammar until I was satisfied with the
result (a simple enough grammar with an accurate enough match to the
observed vocabulary).

However, I will be very surprised if any KMC-like structure is ever
found in Latin or English words. The key features of the latter are
that there is only one gallows per word at most, that the "chairs"
always occur next to the gallows (if there is one), and that the other
letters occur mostly at the end of the word, after the gallows and
tables. (There are other non-trivial rules governing the placement of
<q> <e> <a> <o> <y> <ii> <m> etc. --- my earlier "OKOKOKO" model ---
but these rules seem to have a very local scope, and could be just
consequences of the mapping from the "true" Voynichese alphabet to
EVA.)

I can't see how the key features above could be found in Latin, under
any simple encoding. As far as I know, there is no letter that is
constrained to occur at most once in each Latin word (and yet occurs
on every other word!). More generally, there seems to be no
tripartition of the alphabet into core, mantle, and crust subsets,
with positions nested as specified by the KMC model.

On the other hand, there is an obvious partition of the alphabet in
two classes V and C --- the vowels and consonants --- that tend to
alternate within the word. Indeed, this bipartition is so obvious that
it can be identified by Sukhotin's algorithm, working only with the
digraph frequencies.

If I understood Jacques's description correctly, Sukhotin's algorithm
looks for two subsets C and V of the alphabet that maximize the
frequency of CV and VC transitions in the words. I seem to recall that
Sukhotin's algorithm applied to Voynichese produced only a few
unconvincing results that led nowhere (probably echoes of the OKOKOKO
model). Part of the problem may have been the multiletter
Voynichese->EVA encoding, which tends to obscure the C-V alternations.
But even if we were to use the true Voynichese alphabet, the KMC
strucure would probably prevent the algorithm from finding 
enough CV and VC transitions to call home about.

On the other hand, the KMC structure is not unlike the structure of
single *syllables* in Latin and other natural languages. Syllable
boundaries are partly a matter of convention; but, off of my head, I
would guess that the Latin syllable can be said to have the general
structure SCRVVN where all letters are optional except for one V; and
S, R, and N are specific subsets of the consonnats:

  in prin ci pio cre a vit de us cae lum et te rram 
  te rra au tem e rat i na nis et va cu a et te ne brae 
  su per fa ci em a by ssi ...
  
So it is tempting to identify the core letters K (gallows) of the KMC
model with the main consonant C of the syllable; the mantle letters M (chairs)
with the secondary consonants S and R; the crust letters C (dealers) with the
vowels; and the final groups <iin>, <in>, etc. with the final consonants N.

This theory has some strengths; for instance it seems to fit the
observation that dealers (=vowels) often occur alone, whereas gallows,
tables, and finals (=consonants) almost never do. It also can be
stretched to fit the existence of crust prefixes (=vowels before the
main consonant), which are present only rarely, and almost never have
more than one dealer: they could be lone unstressed vowels that the
author may plausibly have felt that they belonged to the next syllable
("ina-nis  aby-ssi" instead of "i-na-nis a-by-ssi").

Unfortunately I haven't been able to take this idea very far. That
doesn't mean much since I didn't really try, and anyway the general
"syllabic Latin" theory still leaves many knobs to be set.

One problem that gets me stumped is the circles <aoy> ---
I can't see what features of the Latin syllable could correspond 
to them.  Also there is a non-negligible number of words 
with two chairs after the gallows. Also, in the Latin syllable
the sets S, R, and N are non-disjoint, and are subsets of C; 
whereas gallows, chairs, dealers and finals are disjoint. 

Enter the Chinese hypothesis:

Some of these difficulties get resolved (but others get created) if we
assume that Voynichese is an East Asian language such as Chinese (any
dialect), Vietnamese, Khmer, Burmese, Tibetan, etc..

In particular, the  modern Mandarin syllable has the structure CYVVN
where all parts are optional, Y is a glide and N is a final consonant
("n", "ng", rarely "r"):

  lu3 xun4 shi4 jin4 dai4 shi3 shang4 zui4 you3 ying3 xiang3 li4 de wen2
  xue2 jia1 gen1 pi1 ping2 jia1 zhi1 yi1 yi1 ba1 ba1 yi1 nian2 chu1
  sheng1 zai4 zhe4 jiang1 shao4 xing1 yi2 ge xiang1 dang1 fu4 yu4 de

It is tempting to conjecture that C or CY corresponds to the gallows
and chairs (core+mantle), YVV or VV to the suffix dealers, and N to
the final groups. In Chinese too there are unstressed single-vowel
syllables that the author may have chosen to attach to the following
syllable, thus explaining the occasional crust prefix. Unlike Latin,
the three components consist of (mostly) disjoint sets of sounds.

Moreover the Chinese syllable has a tone (one of four pitch patterns),
which is just as important as the consonant. The tone is denoted by a
diacritic or a digit superscript in the modern phonetic script pinyin
(see sample above). Matteo Ricci's spelling system (Macao, ~1585)
apparently used a combination of diacritics, similar to (but simpler)
than that of modern Vietnamese (itself a Jesuit design, ~1620 or
earlier). Between these two there fourished a few other systems,
invented by diacritophobic anglophones, which used dummy consonants or
omitted tones altogether.

You can denote tone with diacritics, superscipts and dummy consonants
only after you have learned how many significantly different tones
there are. If you are still trying to learn the language by ear,
without the benefit of a textbook (or if you are a linguist comparing
languages with different tone systems), you would probably use a
verbose encoding of tone, based on pitch levels instead of pitch
patterns. Thus you may write the Mandarin syllable "ma" in the third
tone as m2a1a3 or m2a13 or 2m1a3, "213" indicating a "mid-low-high"
pitch pattern. I am grasping at the conjecture that the <aoy> serve
precisely such purpose; one point in favor is that they are inserted
chiefly either at the beginning of the syllable, or in the crust
(vowel) suffix; and that is where pitch marks seem to belong.

There are other arguments for Chinese, which I have posted before and
would not repeat here. Let me just observe that, in all the relevant
East Asian languages, the syllable is indeed a unit of meaning; so we
wouldn't have to explain why the author chose to separate syllables
instead of words --- and why most labels seem to be single syllables.

There are problems with Mandarin, though. The number of Mandarin
consonants is much less than the number of core+mantle patterns that
occur in the VMS. Moreover, it seems a bit unlikely that the author
would have used combinations like <ckheshe> to denote a single
consonant. (However, the gwoyeh romatzyh spelling used in Taiwan is
almost that bad. Or perhaps the author was German... 8-) Also Mandarin
has only one or two finals, whereas Voynichese has three or four
common ones, and a few rare ones.

Of course, even if the language is East Asian, it is certainly not
modern Mandarin. At most it would be Mandarin as spoken in the 1500's.
>From a small sample of Ricci's notation (reproduced on the cover of
Jonathan Spence's book), it looks like the syllable structure was
basically the same; but I see five diacritics, so perhaps there were
more than 4 tones back then. I also see a "chum", so there may have
been more final sounds too.

However, the first European visitors to China in modern times were for
a long time confined to Macao, in the Cantonese-speaking region.
Cantonese has eight tones and a richer set of finals (-k, -t, -p,
etc.)  Those may fit the number of final groups in Voynichese.
However the limited number of consonants is still a problem.

Then there are other languages in the region. Linguists nowadays say
that Vietnamese and Chinese are unrelated, but that is one part of
reality that I stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. Not that it matters,
though: Vietnamese is syllable based, has six tones, and more or less
the same syllable structure as Mandarin; so it could do as well. In
fact it has more finals and vowel combinations, and even consonant
clusters like "tr" and "kr". Ditto, in varyning degrees, for Thai,
Khmer, Burmese, French 8-), and a few others languages spoken in
Southeast Asia.

It is known that the Portuguese arrived in that region a few decades
before landing in Macao (~1510), a date that could take some strain
away from the chronology. Unfortunately I could not find any
information about those early contacts.

I have been told that Manchu and Mongolian, although they are
unrelated to Chinese, may fit the bill too. But the best candidate
outside China may be Tibetan. It is a syllabic language with a
rudimentary tone system, consonant clusters, and a modest set of final
sounds. It has a native script, derived from some Indian model, which
is alphabetic but is said to be extremely un-phonetic. Curiously, the
tones are denoted (inconsistently) by prefixing certain dummy
consonants to the syllable, like b and r in "'byung rtsis"
("astronomy"). (Linguists claim that those dummy consonants were
originally pronounced as they are written, and mutated into tones only
a few centuries ago. Now this is another part of reality that I refuse
to accept. Some linguists even claim that there is a remote dialect of
Tibetan where those consonants are still pronounced. It is amazing
what one can get natives to do in exchange of a few packets of
Marlboro.)

(According to one source, the pleiades are called "sMen-du's" in Tibetan.
Can we match that to EVA <doaro>?)


    
    > 
    > 1. Assuming that it is Chinese, which variety of Chinese?
    >    There are dozen of varieties of Chinese, all really
    >    different languages, mutually unintelligible. Plus,
    >    four hundred years ago they were certainly rather
    >    different from what they are today.
    > 
    > 2. It is not necessarily Chinese. My pet "serious" theory
    >    (no tongue in cheek for once) is an extinct language
    >    isolate, just like Basque, or Etruscan, but of course
    >    totally unrelated to either, and which happened to
    >    have a phonological  structure reminiscent of Chinese.
    >    I am persuaded that there were hundreds of such languages
    >    in Europe alone once. In other words, that the linguistic
    >    picture was very much like Papua New Guinea now. If you
    >    are after secrecy, it is a much better "cipher" than
    >    anything available at the time. A "Navaho code", as it were.
    > 

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 02:33:18 2000
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From: Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@gte.net>
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Subject: Re: WG: average word length in VMS
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Dennis wrote:
>         My current plan.  I assume that the underlying
> language is medieval French and that the word divisions
> are in fact syllable breaks, because:
> 
> 1)  Spoken medieval and modern French do not have
> distinct word divisions,
> 
> 2)  If the "words" of Voynichese were in fact
> syllables, that would explain the average short "word"
> length; and

I really like the syllabic idea, too.  Before I found the
discussion of the Chinese theory, I also got that impression,
much to my embarrasment after I posted stuff that was already
discussed.  My problem with the syllabic idea is that we should
see more 1,2 and 3 letter tokens than expected, not less.  Of
course that might explain all of the 'ain' and 'aiin's if they
were nulls thrown in to obfuscate short syllables.  As far as
Chinese proper, there are alot more Voynich tokens than modern
Mandarin, I don't have the stats for other dialects, but I think
most of them are still too small.  I'd like to get a Romanized
sample of one of the Fukien dialects (if there is such a thing),
I think those show more promise than any other Chinese dialects
I am aware of.  The fact that they are pretty 'backwoods' may
mean they have a closer correspondence to old Chinese than
modern dialects, much in the same way that we find 12th century
English songs and words in the hills of Kentucky.
Regards,
Brian

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From: Jacques Guy <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
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Jorge Stolfi wrote:
 
> If I understood Jacques's description correctly, Sukhotin's algorithm
> looks for two subsets C and V of the alphabet that maximize the
> frequency of CV and VC transitions in the words.

Yes. But Sukhotin also wrote that his solution was not optimal.
I say "who cares?": it is computationally unbelievably inexpensive.


> I seem to recall that
> Sukhotin's algorithm applied to Voynichese produced only a few
> unconvincing results that led nowhere (probably echoes of the OKOKOKO
> model). Part of the problem may have been the multiletter
> Voynichese->EVA encoding, which tends to obscure the C-V alternations.

Not part of the problem. The whole problem, I'd say, or very close.

> But even if we were to use the true Voynichese alphabet, the KMC
> strucure would probably prevent the algorithm from finding
> enough CV and VC transitions to call home about.

Not  sure. I once tried the algorithm on a word list  of a language
of Vanuatu which was 90% consonants -- but had 10 vowels. Every
vowel identified, none misidentified. 
 
> On the other hand, the KMC structure is not unlike the structure of
> single *syllables* in Latin and other natural languages. Syllable
> boundaries are partly a matter of convention; but, off of my head, I
> would guess that the Latin syllable can be said to have the general
> structure SCRVVN where all letters are optional except for one V; and
> S, R, and N are specific subsets of the consonnats:
> 
>   in prin ci pio cre a vit de us cae lum et te rram
>   te rra au tem e rat i na nis et va cu a et te ne brae
>   su per fa ci em a by ssi ...
> 
> So it is tempting to identify the core letters K (gallows) of the KMC
> model with the main consonant C of the syllable; the mantle letters M (chairs)
> with the secondary consonants S and R; the crust letters C (dealers) with the
> vowels; and the final groups <iin>, <in>, etc. with the final consonants N.

Look, I know  Latin, I know Chinese. The pattern you have uncovered
looks
strikingly like Chinese. Latin? Let  me scratch my head.  Scratch...
scratch...
scratch... scratch... er.... scratch... scratch... please don't wait
for me.
> 
> This theory has some strengths; for instance it seems to fit the
> observation that dealers (=vowels) often occur alone, whereas gallows,
> tables, and finals (=consonants) almost never do.

If gallows are tonal marks they won't occur alone. Ditto if they
mark vowel/consonant length or/and aspiration. Ever  seen a
spiritus asper occur alone in Greek, and a shaddah without
a letter underneath in Arabic? (Not to mention a Portuguese
tilde without an a, an o, or an e, but not an n!)
 
> Enter the Chinese hypothesis:
 [...]
> Also Mandarin
> has only one or two finals, whereas Voynichese has three or four
> common ones, and a few rare ones.

Mandarin, until the turn of the century, had a glottal-stop
final, analysed by Sinologists as a tone (ru4-sheng1 "entrant tone").
It arose from the loss of earlier finals -p, -t, -k. Cantonese
has kept them, plus final -m, gone to -n in Mandarin. When you
take into account all the other Chinese "dialects" of which
I know about only a few....

> but I see five diacritics, so perhaps there were
> more than 4 tones back then.

That is the ru4-sheng1, really a glottal stop or
perhaps an unreleased k.

> I also see a "chum", so there may have
> been more final sounds too.

Well, a final -m, still not assimilated to -n.
 
 
> I have been told that Manchu and Mongolian, although they are
> unrelated to Chinese, may fit the bill too. But the best candidate
> outside China may be Tibetan. It is a syllabic language with a
> rudimentary tone system, consonant clusters

The consonant clusters are only in the writing. They are 
mostly etymological. Used to be pronounced a long time ago.
It's much like Gaelic spelling.

> and a modest set of final
> sounds. 

More than Mandarin. Lots of vowels, too -- ten, I think

> It has a native script, derived from some Indian model, which
> is alphabetic but is said to be extremely un-phonetic. 

Etymological, as I just wrote.

> Curiously, the
> tones are denoted (inconsistently) by prefixing certain dummy
> consonants to the syllable, like b and r in "'byung rtsis"
> ("astronomy"). 

No, the tone is determined by the final consonant, which
is most often lost in pronunciation.

 
> (According to one source, the pleiades are called "sMen-du's" in Tibetan.
> Can we match that to EVA <doaro>?)

With a great  deal of imagination. I prefer to link them to Basque
mendi "mountain"!

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 03:20:13 2000
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Here is a page with everything you could ever want to know about
Chinese dialects, including lists of the intials and finals and
some notes on various new and historical Romanizations.  Check
out the Min (Fukien) dialects, on cursory glance I like those,
particularly the Xiamen variant.  On the Min dialect pages he
also has a link to early missionary Romanizations.  The guy who
runs the page might be able to give you a good idea of what
dialect would be an appropriate trial case.  
http://www.sungwh.freeserve.co.uk/chinese/ch-intro.htm
Regards,
Brian

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Jacques Guy wrote:
> Er... phonosyntactic oddity? You mean the way in which
> the letters or groups of letters presumably representing
> sounds combine together? 
Yes, pretty much that's what I mean.  If entropy meausres the
percentage chance to correctly guess the next letter, than those
numbers should give each token (or word, or even down to
trigraphs) a value of it's wierdness relative to the general
stats of the language.  Basically, given the analyses of an
enciphered text book (in English) on early civilizations of the
Americas, couldn't we tell that the word Qetzacoatl didn't
belong?  If we could peg foreign words in the text, we could
make reasonable guesses about what language they were in
(English texts rarely include Serbian, but French and Latin are
not uncommon).  Beyond that on a subtler level, spellings like
'ough' in English don't follow the standard rules, but would
leave a fingerprint by being a reasonably large set of a
'standard group of English spelling anomalies'.  I think we
might be able to get a fingerprint saying something to the
effect of 83% of words follow the rules to a reasonable degree,
12% of words deviate by value A, 4% deviate by value B, and 4.3%
deviate by value C with the remaining .7% deviating by a value
greater than C.  In a truly phonetic representation of an
un-influenced language, there should be no words that deviate. 
Addition of foreign words, foreign sounds (English 'th' from the
Anglo-Saxons) and foreign spellings would all be factors that
will cause deviations.  This should give a fingerprint to a
language based on the alphabet they created or borrowed, the
language's historical influences and the nations physical
proximity/trade policy with neighboring countries.  With this
sort of model, one might even be able to correctly decide if an
encrypted text was Berlin German or Belgian German (given those
as the only two choices).  Thoughts?
BTW, here is a good page on Chinese dialects

Regards,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 03:32:40 2000
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From: Rene Zandbergen <rene@voynich.nu>
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Jorge Stolfi wrote:

> I'll assume that you have read my pages about the
> core-mantle-crust (KMC) word structure model,
> http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/00-06-07-word-grammar/

[...]

> However, I will be very surprised if any KMC-like structure is ever
> found in Latin or English words. 

Indeed! And that would be true, by analogy, for other Romance and
Germanic
lanugages as well, and I presume also for Slavionic languages.

> As far as I know, there is no letter that is
> constrained to occur at most once in each Latin word (and yet occurs
> on every other word!). More generally, there seems to be no
> tripartition of the alphabet into core, mantle, and crust subsets,
> with positions nested as specified by the KMC model.

But see below.

[...]

> I seem to recall that Sukhotin's algorithm applied to
> Voynichese produced only a few unconvincing results that led
> nowhere (probably echoes of the OKOKOKO model). Part of the
> problem may have been the multiletter Voynichese->EVA encoding

Jacques ran his tests using the Currier alphabet, IIRC, and while
O, A and 9 were identified as vowels, the confidence levels of 
these identifications were lower than for Latin.

> On the other hand, the KMC structure is not unlike the structure
> of single *syllables* in Latin and other natural languages.

Here are a few other options.
In various representations, numbers show this behaviour too.
Roman numbers (MCLXI) have a strong positional behaviour.
Greek numbers are perhaps even more interesting since there are
nine letters reserved for 1-9, nine for 10,20, ..., 90 and nine
for 100, 200, ... 900. To go higher, the letters for 1-9 are
reused, with some indication of the factor 1000 involved.
Zero is not needed in this system.
Greek astronomical tables used the hexagesimal system so numbers
1-59 would predominate.
Arabic used the same numbering style, while two different 
assignments of letters to numbers were used in parallel.

Also, Arabic words (i.e. not numbers) tend to have a three-character
root, and the shape of the letter depends on whether the letter 
is initial, medial or final. This is the most obvious  parallel to
the KMC structure I can think of.

[ snipping large parts of you-know-what... ]

> It is known that the Portuguese arrived in that region a few decades
> before landing in Macao (~1510), a date that could take some strain
> away from the chronology. Unfortunately I could not find any
> information about those early contacts.

The silk route connection should not be ignored either.

>  (According to one source, the pleiades are called "sMen-du's" in 
>  Tibetan. Can we match that to EVA <doaro>?)

But doaro (or doary) is not a _very_ typical Voynichese word
and fits the KMC model only with a stretch (unless I am mistaken,
please correct). Thus, it could be a 'foreign' word in whatever
language the MS is mainly written in.

Cheers, Rene

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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'Brian Eric Farnell'" <bfarnell@gte.net>, Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: AW: Chinese dialects lingustics page
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 10:07:14 +0200
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Very interesting site,
look at this page too:
http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?flags=eygtnnl&basename=%5Cdata%5C
china%5Cbigchina&recode=yes&hiero=gif

Enter "mao 3" (the modern pinyin for pleijades) in beijing modern field and
get:
mhru:? in old chinese (resembles doaru)
Claus

> -----Ursprngliche Nachricht-----
> Von:	Brian Eric Farnell [SMTP:bfarnell@gte.net]
> Gesendet am:	Mittwoch, 27. September 2000 09:26
> An:	Voynich List
> Betreff:	Chinese dialects lingustics page
> 
> 
> Here is a page with everything you could ever want to know about
> Chinese dialects, including lists of the intials and finals and
> some notes on various new and historical Romanizations.  Check
> out the Min (Fukien) dialects, on cursory glance I like those,
> particularly the Xiamen variant.  On the Min dialect pages he
> also has a link to early missionary Romanizations.  The guy who
> runs the page might be able to give you a good idea of what
> dialect would be an appropriate trial case.  
> http://www.sungwh.freeserve.co.uk/chinese/ch-intro.htm
> Regards,
> Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 04:19:25 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Organization: The University of Birmingham, UK.
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Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 09:18:05 +0100
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On 27 Sep 2000, at 7:31, Rene Zandbergen wrote:

> Stolfi wrote
> > As far as I know, there is no letter that is
> > constrained to occur at most once in each Latin word (and yet occurs
> > on every other word!). 

The "space" character does. Do you think that some of the vms 
letters are in fact nulls and the visual spaces are irrelevant?
Would that keep Zipf's law?

> > I seem to recall that Sukhotin's algorithm applied to
> > Voynichese produced only a few unconvincing results that led
> > nowhere (probably echoes of the OKOKOKO model). Part of the
> > problem may have been the multiletter Voynichese->EVA encoding

> Jacques ran his tests using the Currier alphabet, IIRC, and while
> O, A and 9 were identified as vowels, the confidence levels of
> these identifications were lower than for Latin. 
 

I did this some time ago.


Language       characters   Vowels
English          21360    e,a,o,i,u,y
Latin		         22608    e,i,a,u,o,y

English +       21397    e,a,o,i,,u,y,
dain daiin Latin 23726    i,e,d,o,f,y,h

EVA              32000+   o,c,a,y,n,e,s,g
CURVA            31582    o,y,a,e,Ee,p,g
GAVA             24508    o,y,a,e,Ee,g
FSG              26967    o,y,a,e,Z,g,u
Currier          26134    o,y,a,e,g,u
Frogguy          32000+   e,o,a,y,p,n,j,g

In the vms o, y, a, e and g seem to appear in the different 
alphabets, but one has to remember that the alphabets are not that 
different from each other. I may have the output tables somewhere 
at home.

> Here are a few other options.
> In various representations, numbers show this behaviour too.
> Roman numbers (MCLXI) have a strong positional behaviour.

Yes, but then if the letters were numbers, there are several patterns 
that do not appear even once in the whole vms. I did some pattern 
analysis trying to match Roman numerals abut 2 years ago. I can 
dig it up if anybody wants to look at that.

I seem to barely remember that a bar on top of the number is 
indicative of some factor (*10000 or so?).
There is 1 single instance of the character &173; which looks like 
eva y with a bar on top. I remember that during the Teddington 
meeting we discussed whether this was a numeral.


> > It is known that the Portuguese arrived in that region a few decades
> > before landing in Macao (~1510), a date that could take some strain
> > away from the chronology. Unfortunately I could not find any
> > information about those early contacts.
> 
> The silk route connection should not be ignored either.
> 
> >  (According to one source, the pleiades are called "sMen-du's" in
> >  Tibetan. Can we match that to EVA <doaro>?)

My favourite reading is "Touro" which is "bull" in Portuguese (the 
pleiades are in the Taurus constellation).

Cheers,

Gabriel

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 06:05:43 2000
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Gabriel Landini wrote:
 
> The "space" character does. Do you think that some of the vms
> letters are in fact nulls and the visual spaces are irrelevant?

I have for a long time now that the spaces were irrelevant.
Like in Arabic. But it is not Arabic!  Reminds me... 
several years ago I had written an article, a follow up
for my first article in Cryptologia,  using Sukhotin's
algorithm to tell vowels from consonants in Voynichese,
but I tabled it ("tabled" in American English), sure
that they would never publish it. The gist of it:
x (frogguy x, EVA l, isn't it?) is the letter "u". It
is rare on its own, I mean, next to consonants, but
very  frequent following o (EVA o, frogguy o). Conclusion:
EVA ol is the sound [u], written as in Greek "ou". If
memory serves Greek omicron-upsilon has been pronounced
[u] since around 500 AD. (I just had just replaced 
every occurrence of ox (ol) by some other letter, re-run
the algorithm, etc. Did it for a lot of other likely
combinations. Only ox (ol) withstood the tests).

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 07:48:20 2000
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From: Rene Zandbergen <rene@voynich.nu>
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Frogguy wrote:

> I have [thought] for a long time now that the spaces were
> irrelevant. Like in Arabic. But it is not Arabic! 

This may not be easy to prove...

One argument I can think of is precisely in the pseudo spaces.
In Arabic some of the spaces are real word spaces and the rest
of them break words in two (or more) parts. If this were 
also happening in the VMs, then we should see more labels which
consist of two words (or more). There are some, but not many.
Mainly for that reason I personally think that the word spaces
are for real. 

> The gist of it: x (frogguy x, EVA l, isn't it?) is the letter "u".
> It is rare on its own, I mean, next to consonants, but
> very  frequent following o (EVA o, frogguy o). Conclusion:
> EVA ol is the sound [u], written as in Greek "ou". [...]
> Only ox (ol) withstood the tests).

But Greek also has 'eu' and 'au'. Now, Czech...

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 09:00:52 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Voynichese = Old/unknown/extinct kind of Chinese dialect
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 15:00:18 +0200
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Dear all,
another annotation: AFAIK there is one common high frequently used char in
Chinese (and Japanese too):
de/di/dikl or teki, which means target and is used as suffix or prefix
everywhere in the text. It's function is possessive  or has the meaning of
...-like to adjectives. Could this be the infamous daiin (8AM)?
Just speculating
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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> -----Ursprngliche Nachricht-----
> Von:	Anders, Claus 
> Gesendet am:	Mittwoch, 27. September 2000 10:07
> An:	'Brian Eric Farnell'; Voynich List
> Betreff:	AW: Chinese dialects lingustics page
> 
> Very interesting site,
> look at this page too:
> http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?flags=eygtnnl&basename=%5Cdata%
> 5Cchina%5Cbigchina&recode=yes&hiero=gif
> 
> Enter "mao 3" (the modern pinyin for pleijades) in beijing modern field
> and get:
> mhru:? in old chinese (resembles doaru ????)
> Claus
> 
> -----Ursprngliche Nachricht-----
> Von:	Brian Eric Farnell [SMTP:bfarnell@gte.net]
> Gesendet am:	Mittwoch, 27. September 2000 09:26
> An:	Voynich List
> Betreff:	Chinese dialects lingustics page
> 
> 
> Here is a page with everything you could ever want to know about
> Chinese dialects, including lists of the intials and finals and
> some notes on various new and historical Romanizations.  Check
> out the Min (Fukien) dialects, on cursory glance I like those,
> particularly the Xiamen variant.  On the Min dialect pages he
> also has a link to early missionary Romanizations.  The guy who
> runs the page might be able to give you a good idea of what
> dialect would be an appropriate trial case.  
> http://www.sungwh.freeserve.co.uk/chinese/ch-intro.htm
> Regards,
> Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 09:50:05 2000
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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'Jacques Guy'" <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
Cc: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: AW: Voynichese = Old/unknown/extinct kind of Chinese dialect
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 15:49:28 +0200
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Jacques Guy wrote:

	> It would be too good to be true. Chinese de is (roughly) a
possessive,
	> like English 's. But daiin often occurs reduplicated, impossible
in
> Chinese, at least the Chinese(s) I know. It just could be, but in that
> case,  dy would be a better candidate. However... it all  comes 
> back to me now... deng is a sort of plural marker, really more
> like Japanese  nado ("etc.", "and similar things"). If anything,
> dy is de and daiin is deng.
	[Anders, Claus]  Yes, you're completely right for modern Chinese
(and Japanese too). The problem is (for me ) that I don't know anything
about medieval Chinese. Another question is, if this VMS is a philosophical
book in some Chinese, why are there no references to TMS (every chinese book
I've seen on herbals or something similar has referece to yin/yang ore
aku-points or I Ching). It seems, if VMS is chinese based, (all or most)
drawinga are in no way related to the text. Maybe the astronomical section
has some clues (as for the 28 Houses of stars, found in chinese/japanese
books). What I'm also missing (this was noted before too) are references to
Hanzi/Kanji characters. 

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From: "Anders, Claus" <canders@debis.com>
To: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Typo: TMS=TCM
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 15:53:53 +0200
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Sorry about my typo,
I wanted to express my worries of mentioning TCM (Traditional Chines
Medicine) in VMS and nothig else.
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 Sep 27 10:22:54 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Organization: The University of Birmingham, UK.
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Subject: Re: AW: Voynichese = Old/unknown/extinct kind of Chinese dialect
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On 27 Sep 2000, at 15:49, Anders, Claus wrote:

> Jacques Guy wrote:
>  > It would be too good to be true. Chinese de is (roughly) a
> > possessive,
>  > like English 's. But daiin often occurs reduplicated, impossible in
> > Chinese, at least the Chinese(s) I know. It just could be, but in
> that > case,  dy would be a better candidate. However... it all  comes
> > back to me now... deng is a sort of plural marker, really more >
> like Japanese  nado ("etc.", "and similar things"). If anything, > dy
> is de and daiin is deng.

>  [Anders, Claus]  Yes, you're completely right for modern Chinese (and
> Japanese too). 

I don't think that you can include Japanese. "Ware ware", "soro 
soro", "peko peko" and *many* other words are just duplications. 

Cheers,

Gabriel



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References: <BPEOIKLPOIDECCHIOEMCGEEGCAAA.Claus_Anders@t-online.de> <39D02EA1.6011D2B3@mail.msen.com> <39D09ABF.DF482B07@gte.net> <39D0B94D.55710F91@alphalink.com.au> <39D0D2B9.CE9F5448@micro-net.com> <39D19612.36A04E0B@gte.net>
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	I see a lot of encouraging ideas in all the latest
mail!!  (Or at least ideas that parallel my own
thinking.  ;-)   )

Brian Eric Farnell wrote:
> 
> I really like the syllabic idea, too.  Before I found the
> discussion of the Chinese theory, I also got that impression,
> much to my embarrasment after I posted stuff that was already
> discussed.  My problem with the syllabic idea is that we should
> see more 1,2 and 3 letter tokens than expected, not less.

Jacques Guy wrote:
> 
> Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> 
> 
> > I seem to recall that
> > Sukhotin's algorithm applied to Voynichese produced only a few
> > unconvincing results that led nowhere (probably echoes of the OKOKOKO
> > model). Part of the problem may have been the multiletter
> > Voynichese->EVA encoding, which tends to obscure the C-V alternations.
> 
> Not part of the problem. The whole problem, I'd say, or very close.

	I feel confident that in Voynichese clusters of
letters represent individual phonemes, and that
probably explains the high h1-h2 of Voynichese.

Jacques Guy wrote:

> Jorge Stolfi wrote:

>  On the other hand, the KMC structure is not unlike the structure of
> > single *syllables* in Latin and other natural languages. Syllable
> > boundaries are partly a matter of convention; but, off of my head, I
> > would guess that the Latin syllable can be said to have the general
> > structure SCRVVN where all letters are optional except for one V; and
> > S, R, and N are specific subsets of the consonnats:
> > 
> >   in prin ci pio cre a vit de us cae lum et te rram
> >   te rra au tem e rat i na nis et va cu a et te ne brae
> >   su per fa ci em a by ssi ...
> > 
> Look, I know  Latin, I know Chinese. The pattern you have uncovered
> looks
> strikingly like Chinese. Latin? Let  me scratch my head.  Scratch...
> scratch...
> scratch... scratch... er.... scratch... scratch... please don't wait
> for me.

	I've thought for a long time that Voynichese "words"
are syllables.  This indicates further that Western
languages other than French could be good candidates. 
How about Venetian, Jorge? :-)   (Why do we think that
the VMs probably came from Venice?  I think that was
Toresella's idea.)

	I also used to think that also the strict internal
structure of Voynichese words contributed to the high
h1-h2 of Voynichese. However, the present discussion
shows that you see a constrained, paradigmatic
structure both in "monosyllabic" Eastern languages and
in "polysyllabic" Western languages.

	Is this really surprising?  Consider the fact that the
"monosyllabic" Eastern languages form compounds of more
than one syllable that would be considered "words" in
Western languages.  The real difference between
"monosyllabic" Eastern languages and Western
"polysyllabic" languages is that in the Eastern
languages all forms are free, while in the Western
languages many forms are bound.  In English such
prefixes as un-, super- , ab- , and inter- , and
suffixes like -tion, -ly, -ment, and -ary cannot occur
as free-standing words.  In Mandarin any syllable may
occur as a free-standing word, but it can also can form
compounds with other syllables that a Westerner would
consider a "word", even if the Chinese themselves do
not think of it this way.  They  have syllables that
can perform the functions of un-, super- -ly, -tion,
etc.  We've discussed this on this list.  

	So perhaps finding that Western languages exhibit
syllabic structure comparable to Voynichese and to
Eastern languages as well should come as no surprise.

Brian Eric Farnell wrote:
> 
>  Of
> course that might explain all of the 'ain' and 'aiin's if they
> were nulls thrown in to obfuscate short syllables.  As far as
> Chinese proper, there are alot more Voynich tokens than modern
> Mandarin, I don't have the stats for other dialects, but I think
> most of them are still too small.  

	How many tokens are there in Voynichese?   I forget.

Brian Eric Farnell wrote:
> 
> Jacques Guy wrote:
> > Er... phonosyntactic oddity? You mean the way in which
> > the letters or groups of letters presumably representing
> > sounds combine together? 
> Yes, pretty much that's what I mean.  If entropy meausres the
> percentage chance to correctly guess the next letter, than those
> numbers should give each token (or word, or even down to
> trigraphs) a value of it's wierdness relative to the general
> stats of the language.  Basically, given the analyses of an
> enciphered text book (in English) on early civilizations of the
> Americas, couldn't we tell that the word Qetzacoatl didn't
> belong?  If we could peg foreign words in the text, we could
> make reasonable guesses about what language they were in
> (English texts rarely include Serbian, but French and Latin are
> not uncommon).  Beyond that on a subtler level, spellings like
> 'ough' in English don't follow the standard rules, but would
> leave a fingerprint by being a reasonably large set of a
> 'standard group of English spelling anomalies'.  I think we
> might be able to get a fingerprint saying something to the

	I don't think the entropy would be the right measure
here.  Two different languages could have the same
proportions of combinations like qu- (u almost always
follows q, so the u here gives very little information)
and the same h1-h2.  

	You could formulate rules for what constitutes a valid
syllable in a given language (or a valid word) and see
whether the language in question follows it.  

	(But English is the very worst thing to use as an
example here.  English borrows words very widely from
other languages, but, rather than change their spelling
to fit core English phonetics, it keeps the original
language's spelling and thereby often causes English
speakers to mispronounce them.  My college French Prof.
couldn't stand the way Americans pronounce "reveille"
as "REH- vuh- lee" instead of "ruh-vey-YEY".)

	(Even further afield.  Can anyone tell me what the
Polish word "potrzebie" means?  English-speakers
pronounce this word, used in the adolescent humor
magazine MAD, "pah-tur-ZEE-bee", but the Poles
pronounce it "poh-CHEB-yeh".  I thought it meant
"aspirin" but the Poles say "aspirin" too.)

	Back to the topic at hand.  Another, easier way would
be to compare the two languages' single letter and
digraph frequencies.  The chi^2 and phi^2 tests would
tell you whether any difference is statistically
significant.  

	Question.  The chi^2 and phi^2 tests tell you whether
a difference is significant or not.  It seems to me
that if we want to measure the *magnitude* of the
difference between two different languages, we should
use the *level of confidence for the difference for the
chi^2 or phi^2 test used*.  Is this correct?

	If we knew that Voynichese writing isn't homophonic,
we could simply compare the number of syllables in a
given language with the number of tokens in Voynichese
and thus identify good candidates for the underlying
language of Voynichese.  

	But Voynichese writing may be homophonic.  I've always
assumed this is the reason for the difference between A
and B.  However, more recent studies seem to show that
different writing styles may create the difference seen
with A and B.   I believe Prescott Currier discovered
the difference between A and B.  I just quickly looked
through his paper and didn't see how he established
this; he said he hadn't made slides for those
statistics. 

	We need a measure of the difference between A and B. 
Earlier I proposed the level of significance of the
difference using chi^2 or phi^2.  If we see that the
difference between A and B is no greater than the
difference between two different writers' styles in a
given language, it wouldn't be too unsafe to assume
that Voynichese is not homophonic, and we could proceed
to compare the number of Voynichese tokens with the
number of syllables in candidate languages for
Voynichese.

	Of course, spelling was much less consistent for any
European language during the Middle Ages than it is
today, and that gives a homophonic effect in any case.  

	Further thought encouraged!!

Dennis

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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 16:47:26 +0100
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On 27 Sep 2000, at 9:51, Dennis wrote:
>  How many tokens are there in Voynichese?   I forget.
Almost 39,200 tokens and 8,200 words.

Cheers,
Gabriel

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 13:32:51 2000
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From: Claus_Anders@t-online.de (Claus Anders)
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Subject: Duplication of words 
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 19:34:52 +0200
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Gabriel wrote:
>I don't think that you can include Japanese. "Ware ware", "soro 
>soro", "peko peko" and *many* other words are just duplications. 
>
>Cheers,
>
>Gabriel


Yes Gabriel,
of course in Japanese such duplications as " soro soro nado nado arimasu
nee" :-). But I saw this constructs (esp. teki teki) never within a text,
only in letters (from my japanese pen pal ) and in conversations. But
duplications or more (think of the famous niwa ni wa niwa niwa tori desu -
in the garden are 4 chicken) do exist!
I really don't believe that there is any relation between Japanese and
Voynichese!
Claus


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From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 13:41:16 2000
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Please keep your messages to the Voynich Ms. mailing list text only.
This means turning off options like making an HTML copy of your message,
"winmail.dat" copies, and anything else that won't work on any target
system.  If you have non-text information to share, please find a web
site or ftp site to park it on and give us a pointer to it.

Thanks -

-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	Mersday, 6 Winterfilth S.R. 2000, 17:36
	12.19.7.10.10, 6 Oc 13 Chen, Third Lord of Night

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 20:18:39 2000
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From: Jim Comegys <Comegys_J@maderamail1.madera.k12.ca.us>
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Rene Zandbergen wrote re: character &173 which looks like an EVA "y" with
tilde above.  What page is it on?  (My guess is that elsewhere it is
replaced by "d" as in "dy".)

Jim Comegys, Madera

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Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 21:05:53 -0400
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References: <BPEOIKLPOIDECCHIOEMCGEEGCAAA.Claus_Anders@t-online.de> <39D02EA1.6011D2B3@mail.msen.com> <39D09ABF.DF482B07@gte.net> <39D0B94D.55710F91@alphalink.com.au> <39D0D2B9.CE9F5448@micro-net.com> <39D19612.36A04E0B@gte.net> <39D20976.EDC26965@micro-net.com>
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Dennis wrote:

>         (Even further afield.  Can anyone tell me what the
> Polish word "potrzebie" means?  English-speakers
> pronounce this word, used in the adolescent humor
> magazine MAD, "pah-tur-ZEE-bee", but the Poles
> pronounce it "poh-CHEB-yeh".  I thought it meant
> "aspirin" but the Poles say "aspirin" too.)
> 
 
Dennis,

The Polish word "potrzebie" probably taken from sentance.
It look like in sentance it was "w potrzebie" which means:
in need, to want etc.
The root word "potrzeba" means, need, want, requirements, necessity.
The best way to prenounce the word "potrzebie"is PO-TCHE-BIE.

john

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Dennis wrote:

>>Even further afield. Can anyone tell me what the Polish word "potrzebie" 
means? English-speakers pronounce this word, used in the adolescent humor 
magazine MAD, "pah-tur-ZEE-bee", but the Poles pronounce it "poh-CHEB-yeh".<<

I blush to admit that I'm old enough to remember the early 1950's MAD comic 
book that got afoul of the crazy psychiatrist Fredric ("Seduction of the 
Innocent") Wertham and re-emerged as the present magazine. MAD used to run 
pages, totally without explanation, in foreign languages, and words from 
those pages sometimes crept into the surrounding copy, also quite without 
explanation.

Potrzebie was the most durable of these words, lasting perhaps five years 
before they killed it, also without explanation, around 1959. Kids usually 
pronounced it pot-ra-ZEE-bie. I recall looking it up in a Polish dictionary 
back then, and finding that it was the accusative case of a noun meaning 
"want" or "need".

Bob Richmond
Samurai Pathologist
Knoxville, Tennessee

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 22:15:18 2000
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I also remember Mad Magazine in the 50's when
it cost 20c (CHEAP!), and when it went up to
25c (CHEAP! crossed  out, then STILL CHEAP!).

To me, potrzebie sounded strangely like 
"peau d'zbi" which means "zilch, bugger-all".
(Zbi is slang for "prick", from the Arabic
zubbi "my penis").

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 22:30:02 2000
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"Anders, Claus" wrote:
> 
> Jacques Guy wrote:
> 
>         > It would be too good to be true. Chinese de is (roughly) a
> possessive,
>         > like English 's. But daiin often occurs reduplicated, impossible
> in
> > Chinese, at least the Chinese(s) I know. 

Actually, that duplication is perfectly possible in Chinese,
though they tend to avoid it because it sounds bad.  There are
three different 'de' characters that all perform very similar
grammatical functions, so similar they are often written using
the same character instead of specifying.  These characters all
have alternate meanings and reduplication is very possible.  One
of the characters has the 'target' idea, one has 'ground' and
one has 'virtue' and all of these show up in numerous compounds
with these meanings as well as occuring commonly as grammatical
markers.  If you want to play along that line of thinking, look
for a similar pattern of 'yi' at the beginning of words, these
actually have very pronounced and obvious tones ('de's all slide
toward neutral) but there are a bunch of them and I can see how
they might be appended at word beginnings.  In fact, some of
them eventually became standard compounds because this was a
natural thing to do.  They show up alot more in older texts too,
they have dropped out of spoken speach pretty much, except for
newscasts.
Regards,
Brian

From jim@mail.rand.org  Wed Sep 27 23:21:58 2000
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Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 22:22:28 -0500
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Subject: Potrzebie & MAD magazine
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	Thanks, everyone.  So, potrzebie is the accusative
case of a noun meaning NEED, NECESSITY, DISTRESS, or
WANT.  One might use it in a prepositional phrase, such
as "w potrzebie", "in need", "in want", "in distress". 
If it's accusative, I suppose one could also use it as
a direct object, as in "I cause distress".

	Thanks, all!  I've included everyones' replies for all
the marvelous MAD magazine lore.  I read MAD around
1961-1963 and "potrzebie" was still there.  I never
heard of Frederic Wertham and an early crazy period for
MAD.  I remember the talk of the 1950's and 1960's that
comic books corrupted youth, although by the time I
read them they were quite sanitized.  I've seen 30's
comics that weren't.  

	ObVMs:  One of my friends looked at some of the
biological folios of the VMs.  He said the contorted
piping looked like something from Dr. Seuss.  Hmmm...
Dee and Kelly had unrecorded seances where they looked
into the future.  They saw Dr. Seuss' drawings and 
liked them.  They liked his poems too; the acrostic on
the  text-only page is one of Dr. Seuss' poems,
translated into Enochian and written in Voynich script
...

	Nah.

Dennis

> John Stojko wrote:
> 
> >  (Even further afield.  Can anyone tell me what the
> > Polish word "potrzebie" means?  English-speakers
> > pronounce this word, used in the adolescent humor
> > magazine MAD, "pah-tur-ZEE-bee", but the Poles
> > pronounce it "poh-CHEB-yeh".  I thought it meant
> > "aspirin" but the Poles say "aspirin" too.)
> >
> Dennis,
> 
> The Polish word "potrzebie" probably taken from sentance.
> It look like in sentance it was "w potrzebie" which means:
> in need, to want etc.
> The root word "potrzeba" means, need, want, requirements, necessity.
> The best way to prenounce the word "potrzebie"is PO-TCHE-BIE.

John Grove wrote:
> 
> Hi Dennis, I believe it means NEED or NECESSITY or DISTRESS or WANT

> RSRICHMOND@aol.com wrote:
> 
> I blush to admit that I'm old enough to remember the early 1950's MAD comic
> book that got afoul of the crazy psychiatrist Fredric ("Seduction of the
> Innocent") Wertham and re-emerged as the present magazine. MAD used to run
> pages, totally without explanation, in foreign languages, and words from
> those pages sometimes crept into the surrounding copy, also quite without
> explanation.
> 
> Potrzebie was the most durable of these words, lasting perhaps five years
> before they killed it, also without explanation, around 1959. Kids usually
> pronounced it pot-ra-ZEE-bie. I recall looking it up in a Polish dictionary
> back then, and finding that it was the accusative case of a noun meaning
> "want" or "need".

> Jacques Guy wrote:
> 
> I also remember Mad Magazine in the 50's when
> it cost 20c (CHEAP!), and when it went up to
> 25c (CHEAP! crossed  out, then STILL CHEAP!).
> 
> To me, potrzebie sounded strangely like
> "peau d'zbi" which means "zilch, bugger-all".
> (Zbi is slang for "prick", from the Arabic
> zubbi "my penis").

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    > [Brian Farnell:] My problem with the syllabic idea is that we
    > should see more 1,2 and 3 letter tokens than expected, not less.
    > Of course that might explain all of the 'ain' and 'aiin's if
    > they were nulls thrown in to obfuscate short syllables.
    
My interpretation is that many letters of the true Voynichese alphabet
are being written as 2 or 3 letters in our transcription systems.
I am fairly convinced that EVA <e> (Currier C) is part of the 
preceding gallows or bench letter, and even the circles <aoy>
may well be letter modifiers or pitch indicators. 

If this is true, then Voynichese words are actually a lot shorter
than what they seem to be.  It is quite possible that, say, <daiin>
and <octhedy> are actually two-letter words.

    > As far as Chinese proper, there are alot more Voynich tokens
    > than modern Mandarin, I don't have the stats for other dialects,
    > but I think most of them are still too small.
    
There are ways to squirm out of this difficulty.  
For one thing, in the 1500s people writing in non-classical languages 
(like English) were a lot less paranoid about spelling than 
we are today.  Even in the Lewis and Clark journals (19th century,
by army officers) there is an amazing amount of spelling variation:
five or six different spellings of "buffalo"s, and two spellings
of "ocean" in the same sentence.  Also, if the tone is being indicated
by pitch level marks, these can be randomly placed within the word. 
Perhaps unstressed and/or consonant-less syllables were attached
to the following or preceding word.  Then there are all those "Grove
words", and an unknown amount of "crypto-Grove" words.

Finally, there are some East Asian languages that have a fairly rich 
syllable structure.  A while ago I quoted some syllable counts
from Crytal's Encyclopedia of Language: if I well remember, 
there are a couple of East Asian languages with several thousand
possible syllables.
    
All the best,

--stolfi

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 28 01:35:14 2000
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To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: potrzebie
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In Czech it means something like "requisite".  Quite a common thing
to see on shops in Prague (poss. VM link here? ;-)): given that Prague
is quite an absurdist city, the MAD connection is particularly
effective.

John

From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 28 04:36:40 2000
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From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Organization: The University of Birmingham, UK.
To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 09:34:54 +0100
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On 27 Sep 2000, at 17:03, Jim Comegys wrote:

> Rene Zandbergen wrote re: character &173 which looks like an EVA "y"
> with tilde above.  What page is it on?  (My guess is that elsewhere it
> is replaced by "d" as in "dy".)

I think I wrote that. It is is f69v.C3 (inner circle)
Actually it appears twice:

doair.otaldal.dair.&173;.chdy.otoar.ar.&173;.chy...

Gabriel



From jim@mail.rand.org  Thu Sep 28 05:55:18 2000
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Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 04:55:36 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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	In looking at Prescott Currier's paper, I saw that he
mentions "Some Impressions of the Voynich Manuscript,"
unpublished notes by Prof. A. H. Carter (Former
technical historian, Army Security Agency), 1946.
Carter apparently was "a calligraphic or paleographic
expert".  He said that "the writing is consistent
throughout, and is obviously the work of one man"
(P.C.'s words).  With his statistics on A and B, as
well as his own study of the script, P.C. thinks Carter
daft and/or incompetent.  

	However that may be, I've heard of very few cases
where a professional paleographer actually studied the
VMs.  Would someone who knows this article please
expand on it?

Dennis

From reeds Thu Sep 28 06:49:48 2000
From: reeds@fry.research.att.com (Jim Reeds)
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Albert Howard Carter was a professor of English literature in
civilian life, whose scholarly research involved a lot of reading
Elizabethan era manuscripts.


I have a copy of his "Some Impressions of the Voynich Manuscript",
a 2 page typewritten document, with 9 numbered paragraphs.

The first one reads:

1. On 10 September 1946 at 1200 I met Miss Nill in the Guaranty
Trust Company safety deposit section and spent an hour examining
the Voynich Manuscript. The main impression I carried away is that
although it is by no means a work of art, so much care, so much
time, and so much expense in velum of excellent quality went into
it, it cannot be a hoax. I is conceivably the work of a wealthy
and learned, if deranged, person, but not a hoax.

and so on.

There are copies in the National Cryptologic Museum, file VF 10-8,
and in the Friedman Collection of the Marshall Library, in
file 1614.

Maybe I'll type the rest of it up later today.


By an odd coincidence, my wife had some contact with his son,
also Albert Howard Carter, also an English prof. at the same
university.  I talked with him on the phone, & sent him a copy
of the report.

On Sep 28,  4:55, Dennis wrote:

> Subject: Paleographer A. H. Carter
> 	In looking at Prescott Currier's paper, I saw that he
> mentions "Some Impressions of the Voynich Manuscript,"
> unpublished notes by Prof. A. H. Carter (Former
> technical historian, Army Security Agency), 1946.
> Carter apparently was "a calligraphic or paleographic
> expert".  He said that "the writing is consistent
> throughout, and is obviously the work of one man"
> (P.C.'s words).  With his statistics on A and B, as
> well as his own study of the script, P.C. thinks Carter
> daft and/or incompetent.  
> 
> 	However that may be, I've heard of very few cases
> where a professional paleographer actually studied the
> VMs.  Would someone who knows this article please
> expand on it?
> 
> Dennis
>-- End of excerpt from Dennis



-- 
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


---End of forwarded mail from reeds@fry.research.att.com (Jim Reeds)

-- 
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  Thu Sep 28 21:15:55 2000
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Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 08:01:43 -0700 (PDT)
To: RSRICHMOND@aol.com
Cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: potrzebie
In-Reply-To: <cb.9c0fb40.2703f78c@aol.com>
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On Wed, 27 Sep 2000 RSRICHMOND@aol.com wrote:
> Potrzebie was the most durable of these words, lasting perhaps five years 
> before they killed it, also without explanation, around 1959. Kids usually 

Every good Comp Sci student remembers that Donald E. "The Art of Computer
Programming" Knuth's first published work was _The Potrzebie System of
Weights and Measures_, in MAD.

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

From reeds Thu Sep 28 11:21:07 2000
From: reeds@fry.research.att.com (Jim Reeds)
Message-Id: <1000928112107.ZM7324949@fry.research.att.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 11:21:07 -0400
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I just put a copy of the Carter report on my web site.

http://www.research.att.com/~reeds/voynich/carter.txt

I did sloppy proofreading job, so if you spot anything that 
looks like it might be a mistake, let me know.

-- 
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  Thu Sep 28 13:24:56 2000
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Message-ID: <39D380B1.170736DD@voynich.nu>
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 18:32:33 +0100
From: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene Zandbergen)
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Jim Reeds wrote:
 
> I just put a copy of the Carter report on my web site.

Thanks!
Very interesting reading indeed.

> I did sloppy proofreading job, so if you spot anything that
> looks like it might be a mistake, let me know.

I only saw 2x 'they' in para.3 line 5.

Two questions immediately came up:

1) I'm far removed from being an expert, but is the vellum
   really high-quality? (Probably there are different scales
   of high-quality). Some pages have tears which are
   sewn up and quite a few pages (e.g. in the bio section)
   are smaller and seem to come from the edge of a larger
   sheet which wasn't quite big enough. Maybe that was just
   'economy'.

2) The binding. Yale reports that it is from the 18th or 19th 
   Century (i.e. Jesuits rebound it) and I think Jim once
   wrote that Kraus bound it again (i.e. after Carter saw it but
   before Yale). Kraus (I think) wrote in the inner back cover:

   "Some signature at beginning and end resewn with red linen
    thread.
    Vellum cover attached with leather thongs and vellum guards
    added at beginning and end.  18/2 1967"

    So here we have a small inconsistency.

Cheers, Rene

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep 29 10:48:41 2000
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Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 09:48:05 -0500 (CDT)
From: Paul Schoessow <pvs@work1.hep.anl.gov>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: VMS article in November Sky+Telescope
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The article by Bradley Schaefer emphasizes the astronomical and
astrological aspects of the VMS. Nice reproductions of all the existing
Zodiac pages.


Paul Schoessow                       Argonne National Laboratory
http://www.hep.anl.gov/pvs           High Energy Physics

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Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 12:44:13 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: FOIA and VMS
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Friends, 

Does anyone know if there is Voynich-related work that was done by
American crypto folks that is still classified?  Has anyone organized a
Freedom of Information Act request for same?  Just curious.

--Jason

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep 29 23:23:20 2000
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Message-ID: <39D55C97.4E3F2833@micro-net.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 22:23:03 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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Subject: f85/6: All rosettes picture
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	I felt the need for some distraction, and I used
various images I have to create a full picture of the 9
rosettes together.  It was not a trivial undertaking; I
had to use Xerox machines and imaging software that
didn't cooperate well to get everything together.  Even
so, it was definitely worthwhile!  I'm mounting it on
poster board for regular contemplation.  I'll give some
first impressions.  The thing I haven't heard of before
is the three outward connections from outer corners, as
if to another, outer layer of rosettes.  

	I number the rosettes thus:

	Z7	Z8	Z9
	z4	Z5	Z6
	z1	z2	z3


1)  The wealth of detail is overwhelming.  The ring of
Voynich characters somewhere on each rosette; the small
tags throughout; the inward spiral of Voynich
characters at the center of z9; the little
clockface-like figure of Voynich characters at 7
o'clock to z1; two fields of Voynich characters right
next to a field of stars and a hedgerow field in z3;
the textures you can almost feel; the four offshoots
from z1, z3, z7 and z9 that are all different, but all
point  to the center.

2)  The impression throughout is of something organic. 
The "pebbled" surfaces on several of the rosettes and
the connections seems like the surface of raspberries. 
When I was a boy, we played with "hedgeapples", a heavy
and inedible green fruit that had the same pebbled
look.  The thick connections among all outside rosettes
give the impression of snake skin or perhaps cactus
skin, since there is often a "fur" on the very outside.
The short tubes on z5 and the long tubes that comprise
the inward pointer on z7 seem organic, although I'm not
sure why.  Perhaps they're like cut bamboo or cut
reeds.  

3) There is a sun in the upper left-hand corner of the
whole thing.  The sun looks like a medieval, perhaps an
alchemical, drawing.  There are illegible figures below
it and then eight lines of Voynich text.  

4)  Around most of z9, a lot of the snakeskin-like
material extends to the upper right, as though there
were another rosette there.  In fact there is a small
circle within this material.  The circle has a half
circle of Voynich text around it and some pebbled
material on top.  There are two short lines of
upside-down Voynich text below the small circle. 
Perhaps the artist intended to have another layer of
rosettes.  In fact there are outward connecting tissues
like this at all corners except for z1 with the little
"watch face".  The outward connecting tissue from z4
connects to the sun image.  It is very faint, but there
is something large in the outward tissue from z3.  

5)  Notable are the four offshoots from z1, z3, z7 and
z9 that point to the center. The ones from z3 and z9
look like plant shoots with open ends; the one from z9
is longer and more open.  The one from z7 has the long,
bamboo-like tubes and a rainbow shaped layer of the
"snakeskin" below it.  The one from z1 looks likes a
mushroom.  The ones with open ends (z3, z7, and z9)
have a word of Voynich text emitting from the open end,
although this detail is very faint except on z7.   

6)  z2, z4, and z7 have petals in the main rosette
face.  Just outside the petals are oval spaces with
Voynich words in them.  z2 has seven blue petals and
eight Voynich words.  {I'm using the Smythe image of
z1-z6 to get colors where I can.}  z4 has seven yellow
petals and eight Voynich tags.  z8 has thirteen dark
petals of unknown color and ten Voynich tags.  The
material between the petals of z2 and z4 looks like
small stars; the material in z8 is small circles.  

7)  The four connections from z5 out to z2, z4, z7, and
z6 consists of a herringbone pattern in dark ink that
penetrates the outer walls of the rosettes to flow to
the central design inside.  z7 has the small circles
instead of the herringbone.  

8)  The two towers inside z5 are very indistinct.

9) The interior of z6 is very indistinct.  There is
some Voynich text, very faint striations that may be
petals, perhaps very faint pebbled material.

10)  z7, Newbold's "ovum", has an outer band of pebbled
material and an inner concentric band of the same
stuff.  There is no Voynich text inside that I can see;
it is the only rosette of which this is true.

11)  The interior designs of z1, z3, and z9 are more
complex and harder to describe.  They all contain
Voynich text.  z1 has an elliptical center; around it
are Voynich tags and odd bands, some of the "snakeskin"
material.  z3 has two fields of minute Voynich text,
fields of small stars, and other fields of indefinite
material, one perhaps pebbled, one pebbled in straight,
"hedgerow" lines, and one with material somewhat like
the "herringbone".  z9 has the Voynich text spiral at
the center, then a field of small stars, then odd bands
of organic material.  There is a small castle with two
rampart walls lying on its side at 9 o'clock.  

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Fri Sep 29 23:38:53 2000
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Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 22:39:24 -0500
From: Dennis <ixohoxi@micro-net.com>
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> 6)  z2, z4, and z7 have petals in the main rosette

	should read "z2, z4, and z8", as in the rest of 
this item.  And one more thing:

12)  Each of the thick "snake/cactus skin" connections
between the outer rosettes has a word of Voynich text
on either side, although it is often faint.

Dennis

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep 30 06:36:33 2000
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From: "David R. Jones" <jdnolan@budget.net>
To: "VOYNICH-L" <voynich@rand.org>
References: <39D55C97.4E3F2833@micro-net.com>
Subject: Voynich Astronomical Tables in Sky & Telescope
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 03:35:25 -0700
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There is a good article in the November Sky & Telescope on the astronomical
Tables in the Voynich.  It just got mine in the mail so it should be on the
newsstands now or very soon.

David R. Jones

From jim@mail.rand.org  Sat Sep 30 13:39:15 2000
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From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
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    > There is a good article in the November Sky & Telescope on the
    > astronomical Tables in the Voynich. It just got mine in the mail
    > so it should be on the newsstands now or very soon.

I got a copy too.  It is a nice introduction, and the color
images are just great!

Two things that struck me:

  - in the black-and-white reproductions of the Pisces diagram, 
    the lines connecting the fish to the stars did not make much sense.
    In the color image, one can see two neat lines in the basic brown
    ink connecting each fish to its star, and an irregular line in blue
    ink going from nowhere to nowhere.

    Moreover, the blue paint on the "barrels" (and on the fish fins) is
    applied extremely crudely. The coloring job in the other zodiac
    pages is just as poor

    Once again it looks like the colors are not original, and must have
    been done either by an extremely careless assistant, or by a child.

  - Moreover, even if we assume that some inks may have faded away,
    it is almost certain that the colored paints were applied to only a
    few details --- a dress here, a barrel there, an animal over there
    --- seemingly at random. So the "kid with crayons" alternative seems
    the most likely.

  - The transparent yellow colorused in stars and a few other details
    may be an exception; it seems to have been applied with care and
    aptience, especially in the astr/cosmo/zodiac sections. Even s, it
    seems that most of the zodiac nymphs have had no color applied to
    their hair. Is that impression correct?

  - The month names seem indeed to be much darker than the
    Voynichese text.
  
All the best,

--stolfi

