Voynich Manuscript - Paragraph-Initial Gallows
Sarah Goslee
2006-10-22
1 Introduction
One of the obviously "different" features of the VMS is the paragraph-initial gallows characters. My first thought looking at them was that they might represent some difference in encoding between those paragraphs, since they didn't seem to be part of the succeeding words.
I analyzed the paragraphs in the herbal A section for differences among paragraphs with the four different inital gallows characters: F, K, P, and T. A few other characters appear occasionally.
2 Ordination
Figure 1: Ordination of character frequencies for Voynich herbal A section, by paragraph, labelled with paragraph-initial letter.
Figure 2: Ordination of word frequencies for Voynich herbal A section, by paragraph, labelled with paragraph-initial letter.
Neither ordination on character frequencies nor on word frequencies shows any distinction between paragraphs beginning with the different gallows characters (Figs.
1,
2). The gallows characters don't seem to relate to any difference in underlying language or encoding.