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

[Torsten]

Torsten: my proposed explanation for tightly bound pairs of letters begins with a specific, historically attested cipher mechanism - verbose cipher. This is a starting point that requires pairs of shapes to be locked together.

Nick: What do you mean with letters? You know very well that EVA is stroke based (see 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.). The purpose of EVA is to represent also words like 'coy', 'dcheocy', 'qokhy', 'kccky', and 'chckhhhy'. By using one symbol for 'ch' it is simply not possible to transliterate such words. That a stroke based alphabet is needed to represent the text already says something about the VMS.

Your autocopying hypothesis, however, has no requirement for letters to be locked together. ...

The idea behind the self-citation method is that "the scribe generated the text by copying and varying words from previously written sections" (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 10). Therefore the rules to modify a word or a sequence of glyphs gets important. Self-citation is a dynamic process. Moreover the process is recursive. A word generated by self-citation is at the same time the result of the text generation method as well as a possible source for generating new words.

What you write about the self-citation method doesn't fit the description we have given in our paper. We clearly say that there is no rule to insert glyphs: "The rules to modify a source word normally don't affect the order of the glyphs" (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 10).

Sometimes it looks like a glyph was added. But in most cases only an already existing element was duplicated. For instance the "ligature <ch> consists of two <e>-glyphs connected by a dash. Since <e> can appear repeatedly, it is also possible to add an additional <e>-glyph, leading to words like <cheol> and <sheol>" (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 9).

There is one counter example. The introduction of <chedy> on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The word before <chedy> is <tchey>. To introduce <chedy> it was only necessary to repeat <chey> and to add a <d> before <y>. But <chedy> fits very well to other words in Currier A. It is is similar to <chey> as well as to <cheody>. Therefore <chedy> was used  more and more frequently and Currier A changed into Currier B (see Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 6). See also the details for <chey> and <chedy> on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..