There is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about Amancio et al. 2013, but it appears to be closed.
Since I have a growing interest in the problem of telling meaningful from meaningless texts, I devoted some time to their paper Probing the Statistical Properties of Unknown Texts: Application to the Voynich Manuscript. A first disappointing thing is that the authors have used an EVA transliteration of the VMS, but they mention neither EVA nor the author of the transliteration.
As I expected, I don't understand much of the technical content, which appears to be quite complex. The problem may be my lack of competence, but I am not sure that their approach is sound. I found these passages particularly perplexing:
If I understand correctly, they say that you can discriminate meaningful texts by checking if they differ from texts produced by randomly shuffling the same words.
Currier pointed out at least three features of the VMS that make it different from re-shuffled versions of the same words:
A shuffled text will obviously be very different, with no trace of those three properties:
While the properties pointed out by Currier prove that the word order of Voynichese is not random, I am not sure they are necessarily suggestive of meaningfulness. Word-boundary effects could be explained phonetically (as proposed by Emma May Smith), but this could still be some kind of glossolalia (i.e. phonetical but not meaningful). Also, one can imagine different explanations, like the "visual harmony" proposed by Schwerdtfeger and accepted by Timm and Schinner. As far as I know, the other two properties are unparalleld in written texts (at least in prose, poetry may show some kind of line-effects).
As an example of an ancient non-random but meaningless document, one can consider the tables in the Book of Soyga (successfully analysed by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in 1996). The algorithm according to which the tables were generated is totally deterministic; the only information that the tables add to the (largely meaningless?) heading words on which they are based is due to errors by the scribes who wrote and copied the text.
Since I have a growing interest in the problem of telling meaningful from meaningless texts, I devoted some time to their paper Probing the Statistical Properties of Unknown Texts: Application to the Voynich Manuscript. A first disappointing thing is that the authors have used an EVA transliteration of the VMS, but they mention neither EVA nor the author of the transliteration.
As I expected, I don't understand much of the technical content, which appears to be quite complex. The problem may be my lack of competence, but I am not sure that their approach is sound. I found these passages particularly perplexing:
Quote:The various hypotheses about the VMS can be summarized into three categories: (i) A sequence of words without a meaningful message; (ii) a meaningful text written originally in an existing language which was coded (and possibly encrypted with a mono-alphabetic cipher) in the Voynich alphabet; and (iii) a meaningful text written in an unknown (possibly constructed) language. While it is impossible to investigate systematically all these hypotheses, here we perform a number of statistical analyses which aim at clarifying the feasibility of each of these scenarios. To address point (i) we analyze shuffled texts.
...
The values of X [any of several statistical measures] for the VMS ... in Table 3 indicate that the VMS is not compatible with shuffled texts
...
Table 3 shows the largest distances [between the VMS and its shuffled versions] for intermittency (I and I*) and network measurements (k and L*). Because intermittency is strongly affected by stylistic/semantic aspects and network measurements are mainly influenced by syntactic factors, we take these results to mean that the VMS is not compatible with shuffled, meaningless texts.
If I understand correctly, they say that you can discriminate meaningful texts by checking if they differ from texts produced by randomly shuffling the same words.
Currier pointed out at least three features of the VMS that make it different from re-shuffled versions of the same words:
- "Languages" A and B are Statistically Distinct: some words that are frequent in B never occur in A
- The Line Is a Functional Entity: some words tend to appear at the beginning or end of lines
- Effect of ‘‘Word’’-Final Symbols on the Initial Symbol of the Following ‘‘Word’’: for instance, about 70% of words starting with q- appear after a word ending with -y
A shuffled text will obviously be very different, with no trace of those three properties:
- A and B can no more be distinguished, since B words will be scattered through the whole text.
- Words that only appear line-initially/finally will be moved to different positions, sometimes appearing next to each other.
- q-words will have no preference to follow y- but will uniformly appear after any suffix. This of course will hold for all end-start preferences.
While the properties pointed out by Currier prove that the word order of Voynichese is not random, I am not sure they are necessarily suggestive of meaningfulness. Word-boundary effects could be explained phonetically (as proposed by Emma May Smith), but this could still be some kind of glossolalia (i.e. phonetical but not meaningful). Also, one can imagine different explanations, like the "visual harmony" proposed by Schwerdtfeger and accepted by Timm and Schinner. As far as I know, the other two properties are unparalleld in written texts (at least in prose, poetry may show some kind of line-effects).
As an example of an ancient non-random but meaningless document, one can consider the tables in the Book of Soyga (successfully analysed by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in 1996). The algorithm according to which the tables were generated is totally deterministic; the only information that the tables add to the (largely meaningless?) heading words on which they are based is due to errors by the scribes who wrote and copied the text.
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