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+--- Thread: [split] Verbose cipher? (/thread-3356.html)
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - RobGea - 21-05-2022
You could use 'uncertain spaces' in the ZL transliteration.
Like this perhaps.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - kckluge - 28-05-2022
(15-09-2020, 10:05 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Taking account of the entire resulting inventory of the remaining single characters, plus all of Koen's bigrams, trigrams, and n-grams above, in this way we have produced a character "alphabet" of about 25 values:
[e], [y]
[d], [k], [t]
[s], [l], [r]
[ch], [sh]
[ain], [aiin], [aiiin]
[air], [ar], [al], [am]
[or], [ol]
[ok], [ot], [od]
[qo], [qok], [qot]
Of course there are a handful of additional rare characters/letters as well. But the above inventory should account for the overwhelmingly vast majority of the Voynich ms text.
This general idea is a seductive one that's been floating around for 20ish plus years (I've been one of the people floating it off and on). There is a big problem with it which it took me far too long to recognize, and which I think calls the whole idea into question:
Consider the specific breakdown proposed above. With r, l, d, k, and t serving as the second glyph in a pair as well as standing alone, then you should see substantial numbers of doubled glyphs where the plaintext letter represented by [xy] is followed by the plaintext letter represented by [y] (i.e., if [ok] = 't' and [k] = 'h', then every time "th" appears in the plaintext you'd have "okk" in the ciphertext).
This does not happen much in the Voynich text. Doing a quick and dirty count on the pages in the D'Imperio transcript and translating to EVA, even ignoring spaces the only repeated glyph pairs (other than EVA 'i' in word-final ai*<x> combinations) with greater than single-digit counts are:
Count % digrams (neither is weirdo)
ii: 15 0.0283%
dd: 21 0.0397%
oo: 40 0.0756%
ll: 46 0.0869%
yy: 145 0.274%
cc: 1420 2.68%
Note that d and l are the only glyphs from the proposed breakdown that serve as both the second glyph in a pair and a standalone glyph. That's a big constraint on the contact statistics of the underlying language and the assignment of plaintext letters to elements of the cipher (which, by the way, would massively weaken the cipher), or else it requires a mechanism for keeping those repetitions from happening. Obviously other decompositions into standalone glyphs and glyph pairs are possible, but the problem is still there.
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - Koen G - 28-05-2022
It's just a big mess, isn't it. We'll, it's not a mess. If only it were more of a mess
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - MarcoP - 29-05-2022
The rarity of consecutive repeated glyphs in Voynicese is certainly an issue with this approach.
There are other problems as well: the list posted by Geoffrey leaves out about 7% of EVA: it does not "account for the overwhelmingly vast majority of the Voynich ms text". 7% is more or less equivalent to the frequency of 'o' in English (the fourth most frequent character).
As You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., the alphabet one needs to get a reasonable coverage of Voynichese is considerably larger than the ordinary Latin alphabet. Rene suggested that the hypothetical verbose cipher should then be homophonic (or, I add, include nulls). Maybe it is possible that the scribe, having different options to encode the most frequent characters and/or being able to add nulls, could make his choice in such a way that repeated characters are avoided, solving the problem pointed out by kckluge. This scenario seems to imply that the encoder had a conscious or unconscious idea of how Voynich words should look like and tried to stick to it (something comparable with Timm and Schinner's theory?).
Another issue with Geoffrey's list is that decoding is not deterministic: e.g. [qok] can encode a single character, or two characters as [qo][k]. Same for [qot] vs [qo][t].
Also, treating '[e]' as encoding a plain-text character is not compatible with the many occurrences of 'eee'.
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - nickpelling - 29-05-2022
We do have specific instances of sequentially repeating pairs, most notably 'or' on the first two lines of f15v. That suggests a verbose cipher mechanism is in play, enciphering Roman numbers e.g. iii or xxx. Or perhaps, as Cicco Simonetta's rules would imply, a writer with a thing for eggs. :-)
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - kckluge - 30-05-2022
(29-05-2022, 01:52 PM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We do have specific instances of sequentially repeating pairs, most notably 'or' on the first two lines of f15v. That suggests a verbose cipher mechanism is in play, enciphering Roman numbers e.g. iii or xxx. Or perhaps, as Cicco Simonetta's rules would imply, a writer with a thing for eggs. :-)
The problem I raised isn't about repeated letters in the plaintext. It's about the extreme rarity of repeated script glyphs that end a (hypothetical) verbose pair as well as stand alone.
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - kckluge - 30-05-2022
(29-05-2022, 11:04 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[...]Rene suggested that the hypothetical verbose cipher should then be homophonic (or, I add, include nulls). Maybe it is possible that the scribe, having different options to encode the most frequent characters and/or being able to add nulls, could make his choice in such a way that repeated characters are avoided, solving the problem pointed out by kckluge. This scenario seems to imply that the encoder had a conscious or unconscious idea of how Voynich words should look like and tried to stick to it (something comparable with Timm and Schinner's theory?).
Another issue with Geoffrey's list is that decoding is not deterministic: e.g. [qok] can encode a single character, or two characters as [qo][k]. Same for [qot] vs [qo][t].
Also, treating '[e]' as encoding a plain-text character is not compatible with the many occurrences of 'eee'.
Yes, in principle homophones and nulls could address this.
Not sure we should assume the creator(s) of the system were as averse to needing to do limited backtracking when deciphering as we might be. The lack of an underlying unique parse might be part of our problems if this is a verbose cipher.
As for EVA 'e'...looking at contexts where you have an 'e' not followed by 'e', 'd' or 'y' is an interesting exercise. 'k', 't', 'ch', and 'sh' is the preceding glyph ~90% of the time. Which also helps highlight the prominent role 'k', 't', 'ch', and 'sh' play in multiple phenomena relating to the structure of "words":
* as a big chunk by frequency of the small number of glyphs that can follow 'y' inside a word
* as an optional separator between qo[ktlr] prefixes and e[edy]-based suffixes
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - Scarecrow - 06-06-2022
While talking about verbosity and repetitions (or missing ones), could someone explain these apparent repetitions in this document fragment, in Greek minuscole I believe.
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - Searcher - 06-06-2022
(06-06-2022, 01:12 PM)Scarecrow Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.While talking about verbosity and repetitions (or missing ones), could someone explain these apparent repetitions in this document fragment, in Greek minuscole I believe.As much as I see, it is αλλα ( apocopic αλλ') that means other, else, more.
άλλα:
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RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - Ruby Novacna - 06-06-2022
It's triop small, Scarecrown, however, as Searcher says, it can be alla, nothing mysterious. Moreover, this word occurs several times in the text, but it is not repeated several times in a row.