Discussion of "A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript"

[Torsten]

The occurrences of [daiin] for each page of the first quire are: 7 1 3 5 2 1 5 4 2 2 5 5 4. Considering that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has more words than any of the other pages, I don't see how this is anomalous. 

See the distribution of <daiin> for the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. There are pages without any instance of <daiin>. This is for instance the case for page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

See also the usage of <m> in quire 1 (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Note that the pages f3r, f3v, f6r, and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. belong to the same bifolio.

Indeed, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has 5 [daiin] over eight lines compared with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. having 7 [daiin] over 24 lines. Yet you give the signature word pair for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as [chol, chor], which also have 5 tokens, simply because that page doesn't have any strong matches to [daiin].

In fact page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is used as example in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Moreover, there are more pages using <daiin> in this way. See for instance page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 

Why did the writer choose to copy some words more than others on any given page?

Multiple instances of <daiin> can also mean that the writer was not modifying <daiin> while copying it.

Why does the choice of words and word pairs seem unpredictable aside from their overall frequency? Why did the writer choose to write [daiin] a lot, but [dain] rather less, and [daiir] or [daiiin] a lot less?

They are not unpredictable. See figure 3 on page 6: "high-frequency tokens also tend to have high numbers of similar words." Moreover, "when we look at the three most frequent words on each page, for more than half of the pages two of three will differ in only one detail." 

Indeed, high frequency tokens differ from page to page. But there is a rule behind it. A word is used more frequently if more similar tokens exists on the same page. Note, a token is also similar to itself.

The page f89r2 has a massive 19 tokens of [daiin], yet zero [dain], one [daiiin], and zero [daiir]. He wrote [daiin] three times in a row!Linguistic theories are expected to account for this, but how can you? Did the writer not catch what he was writing? Was he suffering from monotony? Did he forget that he could spice things up a bit by dropping or adding an [i]? Was he simply insane? Blind? Experiencing dementia?

1) For the natural language hypotheses all pages should taken into account. Not just page f89r2.

2) Concerning the natural language hypotheses see page 5: "The overall structure of the VMS token network gives solid additional evidence the text could unlikely be identified as any natural language. ..."

3) If the intention of the scribe was to hide that only similar tokens are copied all the time, it was a mistake to repeat something. The easiest way to remove something repeated is to modify a repeated token. One additional quill stroke is enough to change a glyph into another one. This would also explains the lack of corrections. 

4) Indeed three repeated words in a row are probably a mistake. Maybe, the scribe did not notice or maybe he didn't care. But it is also possible that this is just a transcription mistake and we should transcribe this tokens as <daiin> <daiin> <daiinody> (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

---

Torsten, could you post three or four lines of text generated with your software? Many of the people on the forum have never seen the output from your program.

The programmers on the forum (this includes me) know how to go to github, download it and get it running, but not everyone knows how to do that and they are basically being excluded from the discussion by not being able to see the algorithmic output that everyone is talking about.

In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the text can be downloaded as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..