[split] (lack of) word groups

[-JKP-]

[Edit by Koen: I split this thread for the discussion of a statement by Gordon Rugg]

I actually agree with some of the statements in the article, even though Rugg and I have different perspectives on the VMS, but this statement:

"Here’s one example. All real languages have regularities in word order. In English, ‘I drink coffee’ is a grammatically accurate sentence but ‘coffee drink I’ isn’t. But the words in the Voynich Manuscript You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in their order. That reason alone is enough to eliminate all known languages from being candidates..."

... is a rather context-dependent statement. If the VMS is a simple substitution cipher, then maybe this kind of generalization can be made, but I'm pretty sure it isn't.

It isn't even necessarily a cipher.

Even if it is a cipher, it doesn't take much manipulation to obscure underlying sentence structure, and thus the grammar (if there is any).

Plus, it's not necessarily true that there are no regularities in the word order. There are line patterns and paragraph patterns. This doesn't necessarily mean Voynichese is natural language, but it does mean there are regularities of certain kinds throughout the text. It's not random.


So I think we have to be careful about statements like this until we have a better understanding of VMS text.

[nablator]

All real languages have regularities in word order. In English, ‘I drink coffee’ is a grammatically accurate sentence but ‘coffee drink I’ isn’t. But the words in the Voynich Manuscript You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in their order.

It is unclear what this link to voynich.nu references, probably something Prescott Currier said, but I can't find it. A relevant link would be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ; the "Word Pair Permutation Analysis" done by Marke Fincher.

[Anton]

"But the words in the Voynich Manuscript You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in their order."

This is an interesting statement, with reference to Currier (not sure to what place exactly).

Are there any quantitative results for second-order word entropy?

[nablator]

Are there any quantitative results for second-order word entropy?

There is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

[Anton]

Yes, I've seen that article, but that's not quite what I'm asking about.

[nablator]

The claim about word groups is something I also something I find very interesting. Nablator, could your TTR code be modified for this purpose?

Which claim exactly?

There are 2400+ different adjacent word couples that are repeated, some of them many times. I don't know how much of this can be attributed to chance. I have not studied this.

About reversibility of word pairs, at least for the top of the above list, it seems to me at first glance that most are not as likely to appear in one order as in the opposite order and the differences in counts are often large.

EDIT: As there are huge difference in counts of word pairs between transcriptions no conclusion based on such unreliable data is possible.

[Koen G]

Thread split for the discussion of "regularities in word order" specifically.

[Torsten]

The claim about word groups is something I also something I find very interesting. Nablator, could your TTR code be modified for this purpose?

Which claim exactly?

There are 2400+ different adjacent word couples that are repeated, some of them many times. I don't know how much of this can be attributed to chance. I have not studied this.

About reversibility of word pairs, at least for the top of the above list, it seems to me at first glance that most are not as likely to appear in one order as in the opposite order and the differences in counts are often large.

For example:
59 or aiin
7 aiin or

28 ol chedy
3 chedy ol

There was already a thread about [or aiin] back in 2016: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

[Koen G]

I just noticed there was another thread about this already before: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I now have a sizable corpus of medieval texts so it could be interesting to test this. Do texts really need to contain many repeating "more than three words" sequences in order to be real?
Marco referred to Julian Bunn's post for VM data: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

[Torsten]

I just noticed there was another thread about this already before: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I now have a sizable corpus of medieval texts so it could be interesting to test this. Do texts really need to contain many repeating "more than three words" sequences in order to be real?
Marco referred to Julian Bunn's post for VM data: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The usage of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and therefore for phrases is indeed typical for any natural language: see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.