[Article] "The Strange Quest to Crack the Voynich Code"

[Alin_J]

These are not oddballs or uncommon in medieval script. They are normal and common. Their interpretation is NOT based on shape entirely. It is heavily based on context. So how do you determine which nodes are the same for something like the VMS, which might use the same conventions? Looking similar means very little if you can't read the glyphs. Especially since we don't know if height or tail-length changes the interpretation of a glyph. There are Asian languages where a tiny little serif changes the meaning of a syllable. Even in Hebrew, the distinction between Hey and Chet is difficult for some people to see and much more subtle than the variations among VMS glyphs.

This can be true for any text where we don't know the language or anything about. However, statistics can still say a lot from starting with a basic assumption, and that can be that the meaning of a word is not context-dependent. To go from there and only consider those words which are written exactly the same way in the text could then be a reasonable starting point. If you deal with an unknown language you have to start from an assumption such as this, it is the only way to go. If it is a correct one, the results will probably reveal something. But of course, you can never be sure of anything already from the start regarding an unknown writing.