CONCLUSIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

This study provided evidence to support the conclusion that the gallows characters, individually and as a group, are not null characters. The elimination of gallows variants from the transcription set changed the results of statistical queries on the Voynich manuscript in ways that are consistent with value-laden characters of the same rank and frequency.

It was hypothesized that the gallows variants in the Voynich manuscript alphabet are null characters, and that removing them would not have a statistically relevant impact on correlational power curves. This was not true.

The Voynich manuscript bristles with untouched problems for the enthusiastic researcher. Several possibilities related to this study present themselves.

Most obviously, although the gallows variants present likely candidates for nulls, the rest of the Voynichese alphabet awaits a thorough analysis using the same methodology.

In addition, re-coding the sample texts with the assumption that gallows characters had significance to the document format could be instructive. If they represent word breaks, replicating this study with revised samples would illustrate this.