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+--- Thread: [split] Verbose cipher? (/thread-3356.html)
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - Koen G - 19-09-2020
If I were to develop this into a full theory, I'd first strive for more consistency, like always treat o as a modifier or null.
That's not what I'm after though. It's just an experiment driven to the extreme. You could keep on doing this until your character entropy matches word entropy. And even allowing for some ridiculous transformations, the entropy values remained absolutely bottom tier.
That said, I like to know this information. Entropy and too-low information content are often mentioned by those who criticise Voynichese as natural language. Knowing that h2 can be normalised while keeping h1 in check is good to know for a more nuanced discussion about these matters.
But the bottom line remains that entropy is not a measure of a language. It is a measure of the way a language is written. And for Voynichese, this value is extremely low.
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - Aga Tentakulus - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 10:14 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
But the bottom line remains that entropy is not a measure of a language. It is a measure of the way a language is written. And for Voynichese, this value is extremely low.
I do not agree. On the contrary, the entropy is above average.
I will write an explanation as soon as possible, and will call it "The Tentacle Theory".
Not because it is my pseudonym, but because the system has several arms.
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - geoffreycaveney - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 07:53 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's depressing to see verbose ciphers treated exactly like all the delusional attempts at simple substitution. The fact that verbose ciphers are trillions of times more complex seems to go unnoticed. Actually, the added complexity risks being welcome to the delusional solver, who only sees more room to play around.
Marco, I'm not sure if this comment is specifically directed at my VCI transcription and the accompanying and ensuing ideas that I've expressed, but if it is, I'd appreciate some more specific critical feedback on the details of the analysis that I have presented. I'm happy to listen to feedback and engage in debate and discussion with critics, but I'd like to have more specifics than this terse general comment.
Geoffrey
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - Anton - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 07:53 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would add "the drift from Currier A to Currier B".
Ah yes, definitely!
(19-09-2020, 10:14 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Entropy and too-low information content are often mentioned by those who criticise Voynichese as natural language. Knowing that h2 can be normalised while keeping h1 in check is good to know for a more nuanced discussion about these matters.
Yes, exactly. Traditionally, the low entropy has been used as the main argument against the NL-theories, but insofar it is shown that the entropies can be normalized by transformation of transliteration, this cannot be the decisive argument on its own now.
By the way. Just while writing this post, I invented useful abbreviations describing the well-known categories of VMS theories. They are:
NLT - natural language theory
CT - cipher theory
HT - hoax theory
MFT - modern forgery theory
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - geoffreycaveney - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 04:31 AM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Nice work, Geoffrey. I'm intrigued and entertained. Whether or not it pans out, what you've built is a consistent, logical, testable model for phonetically mapping Voynichese characters, built on solid facts about the properties of the text. Also, from my perspective as a self-taught amateur at linguistics, I'm seeing a solid understanding of the basics of phonology. It's at least a good start; congratulations on constructing a model worth testing (and able to be tested!) at all.
This is probably a matter of taste and personality, but seeing people present fleshed-out ideas about the VMs, and then receive critical feedback, does not, per se, make me cringe. I only cringe when someone receives feedback on their ideas less than gracefully. Like in judo, there is much to be learned by taking a swing at the VMs and missing, understanding why you missed, and observing others do the same. I don't think anybody should be shamed for trying, as long as they receive all feedback graciously and seriously.
Thank you, Renegade. First of all, you deserve credit for being the one who called my attention to Koen's verbose cipher analysis lowering conditional entropy on his blog. I can't follow and keep up with everything, and I had been away from the Voynich ms for a while if and when these ideas were first discussed. I appreciate you for bringing it up again recently and linking to it. That was the spark that led me to develop this VCI transcription, for better or worse.
Quote:A couple of questions, Geoffrey:
I'm glad to see that you define "a couple" the same way I do
Quote:
- Where do you currently stand on the idea of EVA [f] and/or [p] being top-line variations of another glyph? In your model, you equate [f] with [k] and [p] with [t]. Last year, you and I had been toying with the idea of [f] and [p] actually being top-line variations of [d]. What made you change your mind?
I want VCI transcription to be a tool that all Voynich researchers can use. The idea of [f]/[p] as a variant of [d] rather than of [k]/[t] had come to feel like a "pet" theory of mine last year, so I don't want to impose such a minority opinion of mine on a transcription system designed for general use. It seems clear that the general working assumption of most Voynich researchers has been that [f]/[p] are most likely variants of [k]/[t], so VCI is faithful to that consensus. At the same time, [f]/[p] are presented as capital letters in VCI. This gives researchers the flexibility to treat them distinctly, with case-sensitive analysis, and analyze any possibility, including [f]/[p]=[d] or other ideas, but it also makes it simple to treat them in the standard consensus manner, with non-case-sensitive analysis.
I also have to admit that there may have been an element of confirmation bias in my analysis of [f]/[p]=[d] last year, since that equivalence was part of the correspondence table of my Judaeo-Greek hypothesis at the time. That entire hypothesis suffered from excessive ambiguity in the possible phonetic value of each character, leading to extreme ambiguity in the possible reading and meaning of each word or vord. You will notice that I am not repeating that mistake in my current work with the VCI transcription and related analysis.
Quote:
- I'm wondering if EVA [dch] also belongs in your chart, as /kʲ/
At this stage I don't want to force too many such n-gram=single unit equivalences into the system. The system already has plenty of them. As it currently stands VCI can read [dch] as <ki>, and I don't want to get rid of any more vowels than I have to. Of course if the text ends up being Arabic or Maltese, then maybe we don't need all those vowels. But if it ends up being Czech or Irish or Basque, then we should expect to see a normal amount of vowels. Also, it is easy enough to treat <ki> as <kj> at a later stage, if we want to go in that direction.
Quote:
- What are your thoughts on the controversial but intriguing possibility of the equivalence of EVA [a] and [y]?
I think EVA [y], which is also VCI <y>, is a very important and complicated glyph in the ms text. I would not want to rush to equate it with EVA [a] and potentially lose essential distinct information that [y] actually contains and represents. If in the end [a] and [y] do prove to be equivalent, it will still be possible to detect that at a later stage in due time: "Linguy Latiny per se Illustraty, Pars I: Familiy Romany" is not a difficult cipher step to figure out. But if we equate them now, and [y] proves to be distinct, it will be more difficult to recover that distinction if we are all using a system that treats them and presents them as identical.
Quote:
- Suppose for a moment that [a] with no glyphs attached to the right of it — to the extent that this glyph can even be said to have an independent existence — is the same as [y]. Koen and Marco have presented evidence for each in the series [a*] being a separate letter, and your model expands this series into a set of vowel sounds. Wouldn't it make sense, then, that isolated [a] and [y] have the same pronunciation, and both of them represent the most neutral or empty vowel possible? /a/ is definitely a possibility, but I wonder if some type of schwa or barely-pronounced vowel sound could also be it. I'm thinking of the way the Cyrillic alphabet's various yers have lost their status as true vowels, or the way Mandarin Chinese Pinyin Romanization uses "i" after a sibilant to indicate the near lack of a vowel. Or, for a more familiar example to many here, the way Germans pronounce the letter "e" at the end of a word. I also wonder if unattached [a] or [y] could be a wildcard vowel sign, which can be used to write a variety of different vowels, perhaps unaccented ones.
All of these ideas are possibilities. But I would be careful about the idea of a "wildcard vowel sign". In Arabic it might be possible to get away with this and still interpret the text coherently, but in European languages it runs a huge risk of introducing excessive ambiguity into the reading and interpreting of the text. Speaking of Arabic, it has a variety of letters such as 'alif, hamzah, 'alif maqsoura, ta' marbut.ah, that have various positional restrictions and may or may not actually be pronounced.
Quote:
- If the series [o*] represents a series of voiced consonants, might there be a corresponding series of [y/a*], used to explicitly specify an unvoiced consonant? [yk], [yt], [yd], [ar], [as], [al]
Again I want to be careful about the risk of losing other distinct information that [y/a] may contain or represent, and I don't want to get rid of more vowels than we have to. [k], [t], [d] appear without a preceding glyph quite frequently, and it is natural to treat the voiceless obstruent as the default value.
Quote:
- If [or] represents /l/, might [ar] then represent /ɫ/? This is a phonemic distinction in some of the languages under consideration, after all.
Yes, this is quite possible if the language has /ɫ/. But many languages do not, and I don't want to force the symbol for such a relatively uncommon phoneme as a value in the system unless and until we have some evidence that the language of the ms text may actually contain such a lateral fricative phoneme.
Quote:
- I'm not quite following your logic behind [a] = /a/ and [l] = /s/, but then [al] = /a:/. I'm reminded of how in French, syllable coda "s" is not pronounced, but still lengthens the preceding vowel
Yes, I think I said in the post accompanying the VCI tables that [al] was the most difficult decision. The system is more internally consistent if EVA [al] = VCI <as>. But treating the bigrams [ol], [or], [al], [ar] as each representing a single unit was part of Koen's method in generating the 3.01 conditional entropy value for the ms text, and I aimed to have the VCI system respect that method as much as possible. I couldn't find any consistent way to force the treatment of [ar] as a single unit, so I let that go as <al>. (Please note that I was not even remotely thinking of Arabic when I made this decision--if anything, I was thinking of Slavic past tense verb endings!) But out of respect for Koen's method and raising conditional entropy, I forced EVA [al] = VCI <a> in the spirit of his verbose cipher analysis.
Geoffrey
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - RenegadeHealer - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 02:42 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I want VCI transcription to be a tool that all Voynich researchers can use. The idea of [f]/[p] as a variant of [d] rather than of [k]/[t] had come to feel like a "pet" theory of mine last year, so I don't want to impose such a minority opinion of mine on a transcription system designed for general use.
Thanks for clarifying. I guess I didn't realize that you custom built the idea [f]/[p]=[d] in service to your Judeo-Greek theory. I thought it was an idea with some merit, independent of any idea of what the language might be, or even whether Voynichese is language at all.
Last winter I was actually inspired by your idea to design a preliminary test of the hypothesis that [p] is a top-line-only equivalent of some other Voynichese glyph or string of glyphs. I describe the test here:
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I'm going to run it when I get over the hump of learning to work with and statistically analyze VMs transcriptions, and post the results when I do.
On the subject of a tool for general use, what do you foresee other VMs researchers using your VCI system to do? I can tell you what I plan on using it for: cribbing. One of these days I'm going to pick out some strategically placed lines of Voynichese that have been of interest as potential crib sentences due to their context with the imagery, and try using your tool to convert it to the graphemes you suggest. I'll then see if I feel the slightest activity in my hippocampus — the smallest sensation of "this feels vaguely familiar", and trying to place it. If this is an actual promising lead, and not just wishful thinking with too many degrees of freedom, it should soon lead to more Voynichese text becoming comprehensible. If nothing I transformed with your (or anyone else's similar) tool made me say "aha", or none of the "aha" moments swiftly led to bigger "aha"s, then I'd have no further use for your tool. Is that more or less how you were envisioning others using your tool?
Quote:seems clear that the general working assumption of most Voynich researchers has been that [f]/[p] are most likely variants of [k]/[t], so VCI is faithful to that consensus.
What's your source for this? I'm surprised to hear you say this, because it's my understanding that this is far from a consensus. It's not an uncommon opinion, but it's not supported by the occurrence of all gallows (and [d]) together on some lines. A good example is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 12.
Quote:At this stage I don't want to force too many such n-gram=single unit equivalences into the system. The system already has plenty of them. As it currently stands VCI can read [dch] as <ki>, and I don't want to get rid of any more vowels than I have to. Of course if the text ends up being Arabic or Maltese, then maybe we don't need all those vowels. But if it ends up being Czech or Irish or Basque, then we should expect to see a normal amount of vowels. Also, it is easy enough to treat <ki> as <kj> at a later stage, if we want to go in that direction.
Fair enough. I'm just curious, and looking to get more insight into how you built the model. I'm sorry if I missed this, but based on Koen and Marco's work, did you define numerical parameters for where you made the cutoff of which ngrams to treat in your model as single units, versus which ones to continue treating as strings of n units each? If this were my project I probably would, just to make my tool more user-friendly and transparent.
Quote:I think EVA [y], which is also VCI <y>, is a very important and complicated glyph in the ms text. I would not want to rush to equate it with EVA [a] and potentially lose essential distinct information that [y] actually contains and represents. If in the end [a] and [y] do prove to be equivalent, it will still be possible to detect that at a later stage in due time: "Linguy Latiny per se Illustraty, Pars I: Familiy Romany" is not a difficult cipher step to figure out. But if we equate them now, and [y] proves to be distinct, it will be more difficult to recover that distinction if we are all using a system that treats them and presents them as identical.
While we're at it, since I asked you for a source about the ideas [f]=[k] and [p]=[t], I should mention that my source for the idea [a]=[y] is Emma May Smith's blog. Like the equivalences your model allows, this one is controversial, and not at all consensus. But Emma gives some tantalizing clues that it might be true. I only mention this because I'm going to be keeping this possible equivalency in mind while trying out your tool, and I know you're on the lookout for possible glyph equivalencies to make your model better.
Quote:Yes, I think I said in the post accompanying the VCI tables that [al] was the most difficult decision. The system is more internally consistent if EVA [al] = VCI <as>. But treating the bigrams [ol], [or], [al], [ar] as each representing a single unit was part of Koen's method in generating the 3.01 conditional entropy value for the ms text, and I aimed to have the VCI system respect that method as much as possible. I couldn't find any consistent way to force the treatment of [ar] as a single unit, so I let that go as <al>. (Please note that I was not even remotely thinking of Arabic when I made this decision--if anything, I was thinking of Slavic past tense verb endings!) But out of respect for Koen's method and raising conditional entropy, I forced EVA [al] = VCI <a> in the spirit of his verbose cipher analysis.
Thanks for taking the time to indulge my "couple" of questions, Geoffrey. I think the most challenging part of attempting to reverse engineer an unknown system for encoding human phonemes, is determining the right amount of detail and complexity to add before trying it. Add too little, and the system has too much ambiguity and too many degrees of freedom. Add too much, and chances are a lot of the details are wrong and will lead you astray. Also, spend too much time and energy building a model, and it's easy to get too emotionally invested in your masterpiece to accept it not working.
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - nickpelling - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 07:53 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's depressing to see verbose ciphers treated exactly like all the delusional attempts at simple substitution. The fact that verbose ciphers are trillions of times more complex seems to go unnoticed. Actually, the added complexity risks being welcome to the delusional solver, who only sees more room to play around.
This is a good point that doesn't often get made. For me, the reason for looking to verbose cipher mechanisms for some of the answers is that there is a low-level persistent artificiality in the way glyphs combine that fails to match 'pure' language models.
Everyone acknowledges the presence of common groups (such as qo, ol, al, or, ar, ain, aiin, etc), so the bulk of what verbose cipher explanations try to bring to the table is not exactly a surprise.
It's true that there are a number of edge cases (such as dy, y- + gallows, etc) that are hard to work out: but I don't think that this contributes to a high degree of 'play'.
Ultimately, the actual statistics constrain all the degrees of freedom very sharply, so I don't really think there are trillions of good verbose cipher arrangements to consider.
Moreover, there is a good-sized overlap between verbose cipher parsings and 'normal' parsings to consider, one that EVA sidesteps. For example, is ii a single glyph? What about ee and eee?
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - Emma May Smith - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 09:58 PM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Everyone acknowledges the presence of common groups (such as qo, ol, al, or, ar, ain, aiin, etc), so the bulk of what verbose cipher explanations try to bring to the table is not exactly a surprise.
By "presence of common groups" do you mean the bigrams themselves or that such bigrams are meaningful units?
RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - Aga Tentakulus - 19-09-2020
I also see no reason why I should be far away from encryption techniques around 1400.
Sorry, Nick, I stole from you.
Even if he doesn't write Greek (example), it doesn't mean he can't use the symbolism. As long as he sticks to the rules everything is allowed.
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RE: [split] Verbose cipher? - Aga Tentakulus - 19-09-2020
Tentacles_Theory in short form.
Now you only have to understand one thing.
Based on the statement of LisaFaginDavis that several people were involved. It is possible that 5 persons were involved.
Now it is a matter of probability that all 5 persons have the same writing tolerance.
Now there is suspicion of intent. So deception is more important than encryption.
So all transcriptions are also wrong where this has not been taken into account.
As a consequence, all PC analyses, language determinations ...and so on are also wrong.
The signs where I have listed here are only the tip of the iceberg
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