Number of syllables distribution

[Emma May Smith]

Hello Marco

I appreciate if some of the things I've written are a little dense. I suppose Voynich X would be quite like Stolfi's Abnormal Words. Though with two differences: a) some of his words definitely would be removed from Voynich X as my syllabification has no problem with them, and 2) many more unusual syllable combinations would be captured, as both the high and low level structure would be scrutinised. I suppose in all cases, for any kind of structural test or syllabification, good results rely on both how much of the text can be shown to have a regular structure and what it reveals about those words with irregular structure.

I have to say I'm a huge fan of Stolfi, but you already know that. I wish he were still around.

This experiment seems much more approachable, but also here a few examples could be useful.
How would chey, cheeey, pchey, chol, ckhedy, chckhedy be encoded?

Of course, experimenting with and without the 'null' should be fairly easy.

I think it's best, if we're willing to use nulls, just to insert them where we think [y] is missing. We don't have to worry about [h] or [e] sequences. So only two words in your list would be altered to include [N] (null):
[ckhedy] would become [ckheNdy]
[chckhedy] would become [chNckheNdy]

To me it seems obvious that [N] would be picked out a vowel in such cases, but the test is to compare it with the version of the text without the [N]. If we can see that a) [a, y o, N] were much more strongly identified as vowels, and b) everything else was much less strongly identified as vowels, then I think it would be a success.

Basically: if we can insert [N] in a regular and predictable way does it make the result of vowel-finding algorithms clearer?

There is, of course, the problem of whether we count [ch, sh, ckh, cth, cfh, cph, e, ee, eee] as one glyph or multiple, but that's true regardless.