HMM automatic vowel detection

[MarcoP]

This is like computer magic to me, but I understand the results which is the most important. So if you do this to Voynichese it picks out the vowels as well? It would be interesting to play around with this and various different transcriptions. For example, what would happen if we assign a new glyph to "cc"?

Thank you for your comments, Koen!
This stuff is mostly a black box to me too. Before applying the method to Voynichese, I would like to understand more of it, or at least see if it can be used in a way that more consistently detects vowels in different languages. Latin is certainly easier than English in this respect, but the papers I mentioned suggest that the approach should work for English too.
Of course, we don't know which of Voynichese symbols represent vowels so, whatever the output of the method, we can only hope that there is a correlation with vowels. The results of Reddy and Knight were not promising: they say the two states split the symbols in terminal and non-terminal. I must say that, at this stage, I would consider reproducing their results a success As I wrote, I am not at all sure of how similar this experiment is to what they did.

You are certainly right about the problem of transcription. This was also discussed by Stephen You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I also agree that it will be interesting to experiment with different hypothetical digraphs.