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+--- Thread: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels (/thread-3140.html)
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - ReneZ - 10-04-2020
The prefix-stem-suffix structure was first described by Jorge Stolfi in the late 1990's. It was soon superseded by the slightly different core-mantle-crust structure. The latter worked better for one of the two Currier languages (I believe Currier A) than the former.
Gordon Rugg (alone - Jo Hyde, whom I don't know, joined forces more than 10 years later) used the prefix-stem-suffix structure to set up his Cardan grille-based hypothesis.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 10-04-2020
I wonder what scope there is for neatly subdividing words that conform to a given structure or property and words that don't conform to that structure or property. My interest is generally words that don't conform to certain general structures rather than words that do. As I subdivide words into two categories "null words" and "non-null words", which could be called real words or meaningful words, it helps to differentiate between properties that apply to one set or the other, though I can see why this could be regarded as very difficult. Obviously many statistical analyses of Voynichese are applied to the text as a whole and therefore obviously don't distinguish between these "null" and "non-null" words and so may be indicative more of the features of one subset than the other.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 10-04-2020
Of course, from my point of view the better that one can specify the properties of the filler text the better one can start to differentiate between filler text and meaningful text. My suspicion is that most of the idiosyncrasies of Voynichese that are discussed are properties of the filler text, though I have pointed out that a verbose cipher using glyph strings/sequences instead of individual glyphs could also help to explain some of the features of Voynichese.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 10-04-2020
My suspicion about Rugg/Timm's analysis and other analysis is that it works on the basis that there is more regularity overall in Voynichese than in fact there really is. There is clearly quite a lot of regularity, but I think there is not enough focus on the irregularities.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - -JKP- - 10-04-2020
It's better not to combine Rugg and Timm's work as though they are analogous.
The two have approached the VMS text in very different ways and I don't think it's fair to throw Timm and his coauthor into the same bucket as Rugg after they have put so much effort into trying to understand the VMS text.
Rugg had an idea for how to generate meaningless text quickly, but it only superficially resembles Voynichese. It isn't really that similar, so one can hardly say it's relevant.
Timm and Schinner are trying to describe the properties of the VMS text (a much more difficult task) and they are constantly updating their ideas about it.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - RenegadeHealer - 10-04-2020
(10-04-2020, 04:02 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Timm and Schinner are ... constantly updating their ideas about it.
To be fair, Gordon Rugg has also responded to criticism and provided updates and nuances to his original ideas on the VMS. That said, Rugg's work doesn't even belong in the same league as T&S's. Rugg's was an interesting and thought-provoking idea that he put some thought and research into, and presented and defended gracefully, despite the large problems it had. T&S's theory, by comparison, is a serious contender for the solution. As someone who wants to believe the VMS's text is meaningful, T&S's work disquiets me in a way that Rugg's doesn't.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - ReneZ - 10-04-2020
The work of Timm and Schinner shows a great amount of statistics which are interesting and useful. Some of these are related to auto-copying but others not (e.g. the existence of a network of similar words).
However, none of the statistics actually tell us whether this is the result of an intentional autocopying, or whether this is a side effect of some other mechanism that was used to generate the words. (I have already shown this with two examples, in one of the threads dedicated to this paper).
The conclusion that the text is meaningless is not warranted from the data presented.
When Gordong Rugg presented his work, I challenged him to actually create a table and a grille that would be able to regenerate one page in the MS.
He did not do that.
Now, I know that it is actually trivially easy to do that. The Rugg method has this as a very clear 'advantage' over the method of Timm. Every single page in the MS has lots of words that are not a small edit distance away from previous words, so it can't be done for the Timm method.
Of course, this is based entirely on reverse engineering, so in the end it does not mean much.