15-04-2017, 09:13 AM
Donald: thinking about the structure of your argument a little more, it seems to me that what you have put forward is a kind of hybrid of traditional cryptologists' letter contact tables and modern cryptologists' state transition models.
The point of compiling letter contact tables is to try to understand what a letter context predicts about immediately following (or preceding) letters.
The point of building state transition models is to try to understand the sequentially threaded implicit grammar that goes just beyond what you get in letter contact tables.
Modelling Voynichese solely as a (large) set of prefixes and suffixes is arguably even more reductive than Gordon Rugg's table (if more empirical). But I don't honestly think { {pick a prefix} x {pick a suffix} } really counts as a valid state transition model in any useful sense of the phrase.
What I think you then do is try to draw the kind of conclusions you would draw from a state transition model if that were the only valid state transition model possible, along the lines of "because this is the only valid state transition model, Voynichese is therefore meaningless".
However, there are infinitely many other state transition models that aren't constructed as prefixes x suffixes purely after the fact (as yours is), and the failure of your model to please really can't be taken as a theoretical refutation of all of them, can it?
The point of compiling letter contact tables is to try to understand what a letter context predicts about immediately following (or preceding) letters.
The point of building state transition models is to try to understand the sequentially threaded implicit grammar that goes just beyond what you get in letter contact tables.
Modelling Voynichese solely as a (large) set of prefixes and suffixes is arguably even more reductive than Gordon Rugg's table (if more empirical). But I don't honestly think { {pick a prefix} x {pick a suffix} } really counts as a valid state transition model in any useful sense of the phrase.
What I think you then do is try to draw the kind of conclusions you would draw from a state transition model if that were the only valid state transition model possible, along the lines of "because this is the only valid state transition model, Voynichese is therefore meaningless".
However, there are infinitely many other state transition models that aren't constructed as prefixes x suffixes purely after the fact (as yours is), and the failure of your model to please really can't be taken as a theoretical refutation of all of them, can it?