HMM automatic vowel detection

[ReneZ]

Marco, it is great that you have been able to get a working version of this algorithm on such a short time scale, and make it produce realistic results for known plain texts.

The interpretation of results is the most difficult part of all statistical analyses.

Whenever I read comments on the entropy analyses of the Voynich MS text (and that is not only in fora), I see that there is a great risk of mis-interpretation.

These statistics work on a string of symbols. They provide information about this string of symbols, not about the language.
Of course, there is some relationship, since the string of symbols is one representation of a piece of text in a language.
For the Voynich MS we can't yet be sure that the string of symbols is actually a language.
Also, there are many different possible ways to represent the string of 'glyphs' in the MS by a string of symbols.

The analyses are there to provide comparisons.
Until now, they have not led to a clear answer about the nature of the Voynich MS text, but they have been able to show in many ways what cannot work, and which assumptions are necessarily incorrect.

While that may be disappointing, and the lack of a positive identification has occasionally been used to argue that statistics are useless, all this is still highly informative.


It is only the synthesis of all information that can lead to the answer how the text in the MS could have been composed. Many of these analyses are still to be done.

To come back to the Reddy/Knight 'result', this is just one output, and they draw no great conclusions from it (which is the correct thing to do).