The Voynich Ninja

(09-08-2020, 09:39 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How do you know it was easy?

Elementary, my dear Watson ! Usually the authors publish the results of a great work, they do not offer to give the details "If there's demand". 

Thanks Darrin for this interesting analysis.

I read the linked page, and it leaves me with a number of questions.

What exactly do you mean with:

Quote:Languages in non-Latin characters were machine transliterated before normalization.

If one uses Unicode, there is no longer any issue with non-Latin characters. One can still apply the language rules to translate upper case to lower case (for languages that use two cases).

The question of the Voynich MS transliteration is an important point. Now I strongly disagree with JKP's wording, because Eva *is* an alphabet. Just because it is easy to remember doesn't make it a 'mnemonic system'. It is not more a mnemonic system than Currier's alphabet is. It is one of several existing alphabets, and each of them have their own pro's and con's.

The point is that Eva (like the others) is just an approximation and we don't know how good it is, and how much this affects the results. The best we can do is try several alphabets, and see where the 'points' end up in the graph.

Is the size of the alphabet an important property for this analysis? You mention 26, which just happens to be the size of the English alphabet, but most languages have quite different alphabet sizes. Even the different transliteration alphabets for the Voynich MS have different sizes, with Eva at 25, Currier at 36 and extended Eva and v101 well over 100.

Have you looked at the 3rd and 4th component of the PCA as well (which means principal component analysis, rather than peripheral)?

Thanks in advance for any answers.

def mnemonic: "a device such as a pattern of letters, ideas, or associations that assists in remembering something"

It was my understanding that the choice of EVA letter assignments was to help it to be easier to remember (and thus also to be easier to read and type).

If this is a misunderstanding on my part, then why does EVA use the letter "e" instead of a "c" to transliterate this shape: e?

Quote:The point is that Eva (like the others) is just an approximation

An approximation of what? If you change the VMS glyph shapes to something else, then it's not an approximation of the shapes. So then what does it approximate?

Renez Wrote: Now I strongly disagree with JKP's wording, because Eva *is* an alphabet.

Latin is an alphabet. EVA uses the Latin alphabet. EVA is not an alphabet like Latin or Cyrillic or Greek. It doesn't have its own symbol set, it uses the Latin symbol set just as French and German and Italian and English use the Latin symbol set.

EVA is a transliteration system that maps Voynich glyphs to the modern Latin character set. How can it be described as an alphabet when it uses the Latin character set?

Let's not distract from the topic of this thread.

The analysis is promising, but I have considerable difficulty in understand what exactly is being done.
I checked the link to the paper of Pentti Kanerva, but this is only concerned with the hypervectors, not the text analysis.

This piece of text:

Quote:Assign random hypervectors to the twenty six letters of the alphabet and a space character. Parse any large text sample with a sliding three letter window, building a series of trigrams. Combining the trigrams yields a hyperdimensional vector signature for the text sample.

is especially difficult to follow. It does not allow one to understand what the author has done exactly.

Hi dvallis,
thanks for sharing your project.
If you could explain more about the methodology you used
and address the points made by Alin_J and ReneZ, that would be great.

For those interested, heres a nice little github repo for Hyperdimensional computing projects:
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Off Topic: Cool that you included Sumerian and interesting where it appears on the plot.

(09-08-2020, 09:31 AM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The 15th century Ossetic texts?

There are no 15c Ossetic texts. The oldest known text is the 10c You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (now lost), it uses the Greek alphabet, after that the earliest known record is of 18c, and they've been using mostly Cyrillic, but also sometimes Georgian or Latin alphabets.

Also, I think that Hungarian is by no means a Slavic language.

(09-08-2020, 06:39 AM)DonaldFisk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. The practical problem, as you've pointed out, is that very few people know anything about them.      The best way forward is to try to match Voynichese glyphs to phonemes/Cyrillic letters before involving a native speaker.

I think that me or Wladimir could involve native speakers of North Caucasian languages, there are pretty many of them in Russia , but of course one needs some well-formulated questions in advance, otherwise the subject of involvement is not clear.

Exactly. I didn't say it was easy. Took a long freaking time to find books in 50 different languages, normalize and transliterate. I used project Gutenberg for many of them. The obscure ones like Ossetic took a lot of searching.