(22-08-2025, 12:39 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just very briefly, I would see one of the main purposes of 'looping' to be to avoid having the same character in several slots. This does not seem to be achieved, and I suspect (just guessing) that this is the result of trying to achieve a too high coverage.
I think that one of the main problems with the Naibbe approach (which the slot approach does not suffer) is the need to be able to split words into parts, where the different possibilities for each part are somewhat limited in number. I don't think it can be done. Even a short slot system will easily generate large numbers of such apparent parts. No need to list them...
To chime in here, there is enormous benefit to the slot approach, so it's no wonder that so many people over the years have converged on slot-like explanations of how VMS word types are constructed. It's clearly getting at something important. But as you know, whether slot grammars were used to construct VMS word types is distinct from whether individual slots themselves represent units of meaning.
To reconcile the VMS's observed entropy, token length distribution, and type length distribution with the statistics of pretty much any known European language, a VMS-mimic cipher often has to be verbose in its mappings between plaintext alphabet letters and Voynichese glyphs. In the context of many proposed slot grammars, this immediately implies that individual plaintext letters are mapped to glyph strings formed by groups of adjacent or near-adjacent slots. Taking Zattera (2022), for example, the "prefix"
qok is formed from slots 0, 1, and 3. If one VMS slot mapped approximately to one plaintext letter—which would undoubtedly make the whole thing easier to keep in one's head and readily use—then it'd be challenging, and therefore improbable, to achieve the VMS's anomalously low entropy.
After having gone through the process of designing the Naibbe cipher, my personal suspicion is that the VMS slot grammars provide compressed, high-level summaries of how lists of various affixes were iteratively constructed. In other words, the VMS's creator(s) could have easily and iteratively created the affixes
ok,
olk,
ot,
olt, qok,
qolk,
qot, and
qolt, which can then be collectively described using a four-slot structure:
q|
o|
l|
k/
t. This doesn't mean that the slot grammar was formalized prior to the affixes' creation, but rather that the slot grammar summarizes the soft "rules" that were intuitively used during the affixes' creation. Along these same lines, I suspect that one could make pretty serious headway toward a slot-grammar formalism for Polygraphia III.
With regards to breaking up words, I admit it's tricky, but there could theoretically be rules in place to aid the reader, such as initially reading words left-to-right as concatenations of the smallest possible number of the longest possible valid affixes.