This all remains compatible with dumb (i.e. mistake-making) scribes copying glyphs from an intermediate medium (e.g. a wax tablet) without actually understanding what they were copying.
However, I don't believe that talking about an "algorithm" in the context of a 15th century linguistic work makes any sense - algorithms were then only understood as numerical steps. It would take several more centuries before algorithms broke out of their box and expanded into other fields (and we can probably thank our old friend George Boole for that).
The closest the 16th century gets is the tables in the Book of Soyga (which may possibly have been copied from a 15th century Venetian original), but even they are still basically numerical.
If the scribes worked on different source texts (or "seeds" for the generating process) then we don't even know if the variation is the result of variable rules.
(08-03-2020, 01:19 PM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.and we can probably thank our old friend George Boole for that
Wilfrid’s father in law, of course. Rich SantaColoma has entered the chatroom.
Some references to Timm's text generation came up in a recent thread related to the text on f85.
The following quote from JKP was not referring directly to it, but includes a few useful key words:
Quote:My personal opinion (based on studying it) is that there may be a set of rules governing it, but there are a few places where it is extremely difficult to discern why a particular character was inserted in a particular place. I've wrestled with this for years.
Is it mostly rule-based with some room for exceptions? Or is it mostly rule-based with exceptions that encode meaning? If so, the proportion of meaningful text is small.
That there are rules governing word forms, and that these word forms create a pattern of very similar words is one thing. There should be no doubt that this is true.
That the Voynich MS was written by taking previous words and randomly changing it a bit and writing down the result is the proposal of Timm, but this is quite a different thing.
There is nothing arbitrary about the word patterns. Stolfi's core-mantle-crust paradigm explains something like 95% of all words in the MS. Therefore, there are quite strict rules which changes would have been allowed, from the beginning of the MS text till the very end, some 36,000 words in total. In that sense, JKP's question can be answered, I think, that it is more rule-based than exception based.
One could do a numerical experiment as well, but I don't have the right tool to do. However, I can describe it.
Take the common word chedy for example.
There are three ways to change it with a Levenshtein distance of 1.
1) Delete a character.
If we assume
ch to be a unit, this gives four possibilities:
edy ,
chdy ,
chey ,
ched
I don't believe that all four occur, but only the middle two are reasonsbly frequent. So, deleting one character would not not have been done arbitrarily.
2) Swap two characters.
This gives three possibilities: [font=Eva]echdy , chdey , cheyd[/font]
These are all rare or non-existent, so swapping would not have been used a lot. However, some cases exist.
3) Insert a character.
Now there are five possible insertion positions, and at each point in principle over 20 different characters could be inserted. This gives well over 100 different possibilities. I dare say (but I can't check) that only a fraction of them actually exist. So here were see the influence of the 'rules'
Effectively, it means that inside the well-known network of words that has been shown also in this forum, there is a much, much denser network of words that could have been created with the Timm method, but don't exist. This process is strongly governed by rules.
The conclusion that the Voynich MS text is based on a random generation is not supported by this evidence.
Note that I am not saying the opposite. The above argument does not 'prove' in any way that the text is meaningful. I am just saying that we can't tell at the present time.
(26-04-2020, 06:52 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
You just invented your own "random text generation method". You speak about EVA-characters whereas we speak about glyphs. [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]None of your three [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]ways [/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]to [/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]modify a word [/font]was described by us[/font][/font][/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] ([/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]see[/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] [/font]You are not allowed to view links.
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[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif])[/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]! [/font]Then you argue against your
own method and conclude that your method was not used. At the end you mix two unrelated subjects and suggest that the opposite to a random text generation method would be a meaningful text. Sorry, but your reasoning is absurd only.
Well, I didn't use Eva but glyphs.
I also didn't argue that the opposite of random is meaningful. However, the two are mutually exclusive. I would argue that the opposite of your proposal (meaningless) is meaningful, and I also stress again that we cannot conclude either way, and the evidence presented is not helping us to decide either way.
You presented a method to create Voynich look-alike text using a more or less random modification of previous words with small Levenshtein differences.
I have presented a method to do the same starting from a meaningful text.
These two are like the lemon and the banana in You are not allowed to view links.
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Now I may have gotten the various ways to modify words wrong, but that can be fixed. A Levenshtein distance of 1 would be created by substituting any symbol of
chedy by another one.
Again, this presents in the order of 100 different possibilities, of which only a small fraction actually exist. So again, the changes are dominated by complicated rules that have been followed throughout the MS, no sign of arbitrariness.
(26-04-2020, 11:50 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
What you write has nothing todo with our paper. We didn't write about substituting any symbol by any other symbol (see You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.). Your text generation method obviously results in a You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. text. You also didn't respond to our argumentation that "the high regularities of the VMS text significantly limit the maximal amount of information possibly hidden within the 'container', virtually rendering it useless" (You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.). Please note that back in 2004 you argued yourself in a similar way: "... the MS could contain matarial like: "Cotzi, Cotzizin, Cotzizizin, Zinzicon," etc.. or 'Six Marix Morix' which would be meaningless in a different "meaning" of the word :-)" (You are not allowed to view links.
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Torsten, I am sorry but you lost me there...
>> Quote: With other words it is only possible to replace a glyph with a similar one! For instance it is possible to replace [ch] with [sh].
haha, when I wrote this a couple of years back, there was a lot of resistance and I stopped putting in energy in the discussion.