Voynich Reconsidered: the “truncation effect” (Part 2)

For a quick test of the “truncation effect”, I selected a concise and manageable document: Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”. This is of course a very short text, indeed famous for its brevity; and for that reason, not directly comparable with the Voynich manuscript.

My copy of Lincoln’s celebrated speech contains 268 words. There are ninety-three words, or 34.7 percent of the word count, which are used only once: they are hapax legomena. Examples are: battlefield, consecrated, government.


Image credit: Library of Congress / Getty Images.

If we now apply an alphabetic sorting of letters within words, the first line (for example) changes from:

“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent …”

to:

“foru ceors adn eensv ago oru aefhrst bghortu fhort no hist ceinnnott …”

The modified document has the same set of words that occur only once; only the interior order of the words has changed. Thus the incidence of hapax legomena remains the same, at ninety-three words or 34.7 percent of the text.

The test for hapax legomena tells us that this document is, in some sense, meaningful, even if the meaning is not apparent in the words as they now appear.

Removal of initial letters

If we now remove the initial letter of every word, the first line becomes:

“oru eors dn ensv go ru efhrst ghortu hort o ist einnnott …”

Here the alphabetic order of the letters is preserved, but the vocabulary is reduced. For example, the words “as” and “is” in the original, which remained distinct in the sorted version, now both become “s”. The truncated document has eighty-six words which are hapax legomena; they constitute 32.1 percent of the text.

Examples of hapax legomena in the truncated document include: “cceenorst” (derived from “consecrate”), “ghortu” (derived from “brought”), and efhrst (derived from “fathers”). In words such as these, we see echoes of the rigid order of glyphs, as well as the occasional doubled glyphs, in the Voynich manuscript.

It seems to me a significant result, that following the alphabetic sorting of letters within words, removing initial letters does not increase the incidence of hapax legomena. The test is telling us that there is still meaning in the remaining text.