(17-02-2020, 08:22 PM)Torsten wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Jonas!
I wonder if the summary given with the reference to your paper is correct in your eyes?
The undark.org article states that a "statistical paper published in November described how visual analysis of the letters identified patterns in the script itself that seem similar to other written alphabets." As far as I can see this doesn't seem to fit with your results. You explicitly wrote: "This study neither intends to support that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax or that it is a meaningful text" (Alin 2019, p. 2). In fact, you are also arguing that the PCA analyses was "not completely successful in classifying the characters into vowel- and consonant groups, or the script either does not contain vowels (abjad-script), or has vowels and consonants arranged in some other fashion due to a transposition encryption scheme" (Alin 2019, p. 13).
Further you describe the following observation "the more similar the characters look, the more similar would be their pattern of transition probabilities to other characters" (Alin 2019, p. 16). This way your paper does in fact confirm our description of the VMs (see Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 2f or Timm 2014, p. 4f) and also confirms one of the three modification rules we describe in our paper: select a source word and modify it, by replacing "one or more glyphs by similar ones" (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 9).
Yes, and I draw no conclusions towards either of the meaningful- or meaningless text hypotheses in there myself. I leave the question open for various interpretations of the results so to speak. It seems that at least one has chosen to interpret the results this way, and there might be reasons for this, and who am I to argue without the full reasoning. It might be in the way of observing for example the division between "vowels" and "consonants" resembling those in natural languages, with characters in one of the sets actually resembling a/o/i/e in our alphabets etc. This is all however very subjective.
Personally I have no other interest than the truth, whatever that might be.