[split] An interview with Stephen Bax - 1 to 1 substitution discussion

[Torsten]

I love the words 'almost' and 'with rare exceptions' in these examples. That means immediately that these are NOT 'severe restrictions'!  This for me is an example of overanalysing and ending up in a self-imposed dead end. 

There are perfectly enough symbols in the Voynich script to accommodate two sounds in the region of /r/ , and a terminal symbol (EVA m) as a counterpart to the main symbol (EVA r).  But we are so far from having a full sound/symbol correspondence list that at this stage the discussion is a waste of breath. It doesn't move us forward in any way, so personally I intend to waste no more time on it, and focus instead on continuing to try to decode the script.

Sorry, but you can't argue that you are interested in 100 % rules only. It is a fact that the order of letters in the VMS is highly predictable. For this reason the second order entropy for the VMS is lower then in other European languages.

For instance the [q]-glyph is in 99,5% the first glyph in a glyph group and is followed in 97 % by an [o]-glyph. The [d]-glyph is followed in 53 % by [y], in 31 % by [a] and only in 4 % by [o]. ... It is reasonable that the text of the VMS contains some errors and that the transcription of the VMS contains errors. Therefore it would makes sense to ask if a [d] followed by [o] is maybe an error.

Even if the order of letters in words is highly predictable the order of words in the text is not. The text of the VMS contains very few repeated word bigrams and trigrams. In a text using human language grammatical relations should exist between words and these relations should result in words used together multiple times. If you assume that the text of the VMS is representing natural language the lack of repeated word bigrams and trigrams should at least surprise you. Also Curriers observation that the text in herbal A is statistical different from the text in herbal B should surprise you. Why the text of the VMS behaves so different from text containing natural language?

There are different thinkable explanations for the text of the VMS:
1) the text represents an unknown natural language
2) the text represents an invented language
3) the text is some kind of cipher text
4) the text is a meaningless pseudo text

Which explanation is the correct one? If you are just guessing you have a 25 % chance that your choice is the correct one. Therefore it would be much more convincing if you would explain your decision.