Labelese Analysis

[Mark Knowles]

Rene: To say even more, I am keen to get the opinions of others that is why I emphasised the importance of consulting experts.

I am open to the possibility that my theory may be wrong, but that is the direction that in my assessment the evidence points.

I could say that I have studied the 9 rosette page more than anyone, which is almost certainly true(I am familiar with Diane's analysis), so everyone should take my opinion, but I deliberately haven't said that as I think that appeals to authority aren't worth much.

[ReneZ]

But if someone were to say "it is not a diplomatic style cipher" and then provide no adequate justification then that's not going help me much.

Really.
You have been explained many times that diplomatic ciphers generate code text with more than the usual set of different symbols. They also will never ever decrease the entropy.
If you consider that "no adequate justification" then it means you have not understood it or just decided to ignore it.

Already one thread was closed as a consequence of this point. I won't therefore go any further than this.

[Mark Knowles]

Rene: Sorry you are upset. I will look into the entropy question. The previous thread was not closed on this point as far as I remember; I will check. I can easily address JKP's directionality point.

[Mark Knowles]

Rene: I suppose I ought to say the following and reiterate that no adequate justication has, as yet, been presented to me regarding my suggestion discussed with JKP as to why we cannot be dealing with an atypical diplomatic cipher of the style I described; though I would very much appreciate critiques. I presented my idea as to how the cipher I suggested can operate without more than the usual set of different symbols.It should be obvious how within such a cipher as I described that JKPs  directionality objection poses no problem. Do tell me why these arguments still pose the problems mentioned, but first make sure you have read what I have written on this as otherwise there is likely to still be confusion.

On that basis I suggest that on this subject "it means you have not understood it or just decided to ignore it." rather than me.

I should say that the previous thread was not closed as a consequence of either of these points; if you read back over it that ought to be apparent.

Anyway I don't want this to get acrimonious, I started this thread to ask a specific question, which Marco was very kind to address, then I got sidetracked onto a different subject against my wishes.

I made a specific point on Koen's thread and then got side tracked by JKP.

I am trying to be as reasonable as possible and am not looking for an argument, but just wanted to raise a question about how and if labels are flagged in the data; a question to which I did not know the answer.

[Mark Knowles]

One question, I think worth adding, is to do with how we know whether something is a possible label or part of a sentence. For example on the 9 rosette page the rosettes are encircled by text; now this text could be a series of single word labels or continous piece of text, so I don't know if there is a flag for "possible" label as well "definite label".

My interest in labels is obviously that they generally constitute single isolated words not part of a sentence and avoid the complexities of sentence text, therefore it appears to me are voynichese in its simplest form.

So I would want to ignore any text which does not constitute an isolated word and select all isolated words in the text; this of course means that I am not really interested at this stage in labels made up of two or more words. However I imagine this is easy to do.

[Mark Knowles]

Similarly it would be nice to be able to sort the labels by length and consider the subset of labels of a given length range, however I would be very surprised it if is not relatively easy to do this.

[-JKP-]

Similarly it would be nice to be able to sort the labels by length and consider the subset of labels of a given length range, however I would be very surprised it if is not relatively easy to do this.

Yes, very easy. Sorting by length takes about 10 seconds.

[Mark Knowles]

JKP: Thanks. Yes, that is what I thought, it is hard to imagine how it could be difficult