12-07-2026, 09:34 AM
In my thread, you presented your theory as if it required fewer assumptions or rules to explain all the statistical peculiarities that VBM can explain.
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I’m replying in your thread in accordance with the forum rules so as not to confuse the thread topics; I hope that’s okay.
I took the time to check this out—though I’m not entirely sure what exactly is part of your theory. So please feel free to correct me if I’ve made a mistake.
Your system using Roman numerals, as you describe it here, requires:
1. Plain text to which a Roman numeral is assigned for each letter.
2. Sorting in descending order within a word.
3. A second artificial alphabet that maps these numerals to Voynich glyphs.
4. bigrams that encode letters OR abbreviations OR morphemes as needed (actually, that’s already several rules, but never mind.
5. freely insertable zero characters from an open list
6. arbitrary word separation and merging (without any rules?))
7. two cipher tables—one with letters and the other with abbreviations. (which, however, makes decryption nearly impossible).
8. Symbol values that are “invented” to force individual glyphs into the system — for example, EVA x = 150 is justified by the astrological quincunx angle. But what about all the other numbers???
9. Adjustments at the end of words “for aesthetic reasons.”
9 rules versus 4 to 6. So Ockham’s razor works against you, not for you.
And even with these 6-9 rules—some of which allow for a high degree of flexibility—your model still lacks a mechanism for:
a. Long-range dependencies that span three glyphs AND cross a word boundary. Your per-word sorting makes cross-word dependencies impossible by design.
b. The steep Zipf curve of the VMS bigram distribution. The descending sorting per word smooths out precisely the structure that the language generates.
c. The fact that a small set of positional rules predicts over 90% of placements at word boundaries, because free zero insertions and arbitrary word breaks have too many degrees of freedom to produce such strict constraints.
d. Repeated sequences of four “chol” or five “okedy.” According to your scheme, the plaintext would have to contain the same content four to five times in a row—which is syntactically implausible in a herbal.
e. Your system does not explain the distribution of word lengths among the VMS words, unless you used arbitrary word breaks, which in turn allows for a high degree of freedom and makes the cipher less plausible, once again making it very difficult to decrypt.
f. You have no idea why these LAAFU effects should occur; it makes no sense in your cipher.
g. The system does not explain the sequence of similar words (words that differ by only one letter), unless it involves consistently inserting zeros in the same sequence—which would result in the system having completely nonsensical degrees of freedom. After all, the VMS could then consist of just three sentences, with the rest being all zeros. Such an assignment is meaningless.
h. The many hapaxes that don’t fit natural language—and they’d have that problem anyway, since the words remain roughly the same regardless.
i. The problem that descending sort order causes many (!) words to map to identical words, which in turn cannot be back-translated.
I'm sorry, but aside from the fact that your system suffers massively from too many lines of freedom, it makes too many assumptions and still can't explain all these statistical peculiarities clearly enough without making further additional assumptions. But that's exactly what I don't do with the VBM
No hard feelings—I don’t mean any harm! I normally wouldn’t have chimed in here at all, because I found the cipher idea fundamentally clever and interesting. But as it stands, it’s still too underdeveloped to fit the VMS (I read the thread). And I started out with a lot of “nonsense” myself—that’s normal and part of the process; it might never stop until, perhaps by chance or not, we can finally translate the entire VMS.
But you threw the ball into my court, so I had to pick it up. I hope you understand. 
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
in reply to:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I’m replying in your thread in accordance with the forum rules so as not to confuse the thread topics; I hope that’s okay.
I took the time to check this out—though I’m not entirely sure what exactly is part of your theory. So please feel free to correct me if I’ve made a mistake.
Your system using Roman numerals, as you describe it here, requires:
1. Plain text to which a Roman numeral is assigned for each letter.
2. Sorting in descending order within a word.
3. A second artificial alphabet that maps these numerals to Voynich glyphs.
4. bigrams that encode letters OR abbreviations OR morphemes as needed (actually, that’s already several rules, but never mind.
5. freely insertable zero characters from an open list
6. arbitrary word separation and merging (without any rules?))
7. two cipher tables—one with letters and the other with abbreviations. (which, however, makes decryption nearly impossible).
8. Symbol values that are “invented” to force individual glyphs into the system — for example, EVA x = 150 is justified by the astrological quincunx angle. But what about all the other numbers???
9. Adjustments at the end of words “for aesthetic reasons.”
9 rules versus 4 to 6. So Ockham’s razor works against you, not for you.
And even with these 6-9 rules—some of which allow for a high degree of flexibility—your model still lacks a mechanism for:
a. Long-range dependencies that span three glyphs AND cross a word boundary. Your per-word sorting makes cross-word dependencies impossible by design.
b. The steep Zipf curve of the VMS bigram distribution. The descending sorting per word smooths out precisely the structure that the language generates.
c. The fact that a small set of positional rules predicts over 90% of placements at word boundaries, because free zero insertions and arbitrary word breaks have too many degrees of freedom to produce such strict constraints.
d. Repeated sequences of four “chol” or five “okedy.” According to your scheme, the plaintext would have to contain the same content four to five times in a row—which is syntactically implausible in a herbal.
e. Your system does not explain the distribution of word lengths among the VMS words, unless you used arbitrary word breaks, which in turn allows for a high degree of freedom and makes the cipher less plausible, once again making it very difficult to decrypt.
f. You have no idea why these LAAFU effects should occur; it makes no sense in your cipher.
g. The system does not explain the sequence of similar words (words that differ by only one letter), unless it involves consistently inserting zeros in the same sequence—which would result in the system having completely nonsensical degrees of freedom. After all, the VMS could then consist of just three sentences, with the rest being all zeros. Such an assignment is meaningless.
h. The many hapaxes that don’t fit natural language—and they’d have that problem anyway, since the words remain roughly the same regardless.
i. The problem that descending sort order causes many (!) words to map to identical words, which in turn cannot be back-translated.
I'm sorry, but aside from the fact that your system suffers massively from too many lines of freedom, it makes too many assumptions and still can't explain all these statistical peculiarities clearly enough without making further additional assumptions. But that's exactly what I don't do with the VBM
No hard feelings—I don’t mean any harm! I normally wouldn’t have chimed in here at all, because I found the cipher idea fundamentally clever and interesting. But as it stands, it’s still too underdeveloped to fit the VMS (I read the thread). And I started out with a lot of “nonsense” myself—that’s normal and part of the process; it might never stop until, perhaps by chance or not, we can finally translate the entire VMS.
But you threw the ball into my court, so I had to pick it up.
I hope you understand. 
