A term suggestion for Voynichese "words"

[Anton]

I have a trifle suggestion.

Now and then we have to refer to the notion of Voynichese "words". Sometimes they are called "words" (which is not strictly true, because we are not sure that they represent words really), sometimes they are called "tokens", which does not look to me a 100% perfect designation neither, from the linguistics point of view.

Perhaps if we borrow a term from the IT world we may call them "chunks".

I'd like to introduce a field-invariant suggestion though, which simply circumvents the problem by means of a neologism.

Why not call them "vords" (= Voynichese words)?

Whether this name becomes widespread depends of course on whether you'd like it

[-JKP-]

I actually like the idea of vords... the only problem being that newcomers won't get it and will be  constantly correcting it.


I've been calling them glyph-groups, words, letter chunks, and a few things that are not repeatable in polite company, without being fully satisfied with any of them. Even word-tokens doesn't quite work.

I suppose VorMs would be stretching it, but they often feel that way to me—little parasites infecting the page just enough to keep our attention. The work hunks is already taken and might attract the wrong audience through Google.


Glyph-groups could be gloups.

[david]

and a few things that are not repeatable in polite company

Amen bro!

[crezac]

I have a trifle suggestion.

Now and then we have to refer to the notion of Voynichese "words". Sometimes they are called "words" (which is not strictly true, because we are not sure that they represent words really), sometimes they are called "tokens", which does not look to me a 100% perfect designation neither, from the linguistics point of view.

Perhaps if we borrow a term from the IT world we may call them "chunks".

A "chunk" is just reading a fixed amount of data, usually a substantial amount. What you want is a "string" -- an array of characters in a specific order.  We also have a term for the natural unit of data used by a particular processor design -- it's word.

If you want to use chunk I suggest you use it for paragraphs since we aren't sure they are paragraphs yet 


On vord I'm in favor of inventing as little jargon as possible.  More jargon means a smaller number of people willing to join the discussion, plus it sounds like the evil alien race in a SciFi B-movie.

[ReneZ]

'word' and 'token' have both been used in the past to designate a group of characters delimited by (apparent) spaces, but unfortunately also with their meanings swapped.
The two questions:
- how many words are there in the Voynich MS?
- how many different words are there in the Voynich MS?
could be answered (*) with:
N words and M tokens. But which is which? I don't see an obvious preference -
or do we indeed need a new term for one or both?

I decided recently to follow the terminology of Reddy and Knight, who use 'word tokens'
and 'word types'. Here it is more naturally understood that several 'word tokens' can be the same (*)
but all 'word types' are different, and there are fewer word types than word tokens.

'word length distribution' is ambiguous. The graph looks different for word tokens and word types.

I would be interested to know (and happy if someone here knows) whether this is an accepted, standard
usage.

- - -
Note (*):
Of course we don't know, but can only estimate based on some assumptions.

[Emma May Smith]

Look up type-token distinction.

Though I'm more used to "word" and "token" in language environments for these two terms. That's the usage I've sought to hold to.