[Article] Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script

[MarcoP]

I still don't understand why some people are mildly positive about this paper. I'm not a coding expert, but I do know that abjad anagramming is a one way cipher. And that plonking your results into google translate is an absolutely embarassing thing to write about in a scientific paper. Am I missing something?

Hi Koen,
I am not an expert either and I possibly only understood 50% of the paper. Still, I am positive about it. Here are some totally subjective reasons:

* VMS hobbyists tend to almost exclusively focus on manuscript images. This forum is no exception: in the last month there were 13 active threads in "Imagery" and only 2 in "Analysis of the text". As you know, I discovered the ms through the work of Prof.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., so I have always been interested in the language as well as the illustrations. I am positive about all contributions that seriously examine the Voynichese language.

* Real experts seldom contribute to Voynich research. It's great that someone like Prof.Kondrak took an interest in the ms. I hope to read more from him.

* My impression is that a lot of hard work has been put into this research. Sometimes you also read a blog post in which a fair amount of work has been put, but this is rare and typically the work-hours/words ratio is much lower than in a scientific paper like this.

* The histogram in fig.4 is the kind of things I find interesting. The authors compared Voynichese with 380 different languages and applied a quantitative distance measure (resulting in Hebrew clearly being the best candidate). There is something interesting going on here. Of course, without perfectly understanding the details (which I don't), it's impossible to put this information to good use. Crap press simply concludes that "the ms is written in Hebrew", but this is quite uncertain and very different from what the authors say.

* I learned from this paper that "Knight et al. (2011) describe a successful decipherment of an eighteenth century text known as the Copiale Cipher". I could have learned about this elsewhere, but I haven't seen Knight's decipherment of the Copiale Cipher much discussed in the Voynich amateurish community. Making the good work of other researchers known is a major contribution. I am grateful to Hauer and Kondrak for this reference. [Knight's paper is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I haven't read it yet]

Is the Hauer and Kondrak's paper perfect? Of course not. Rene is  right in pointing out that one cannot rely on a single VMS transcription (even if Currier seems to me a relatively good choice) and of course "google translate" has nothing to add to the paper. But in my eyes these limits are amply compensated by all the experiments with new approaches discussed.

Possibly others look down at this paper because they have done better than this: they write great Natural Language Processing software, they have read all the literature and published better works in more respected publications. But where is this stuff?