[Article] Word Probability Findings in the Voynich Manuscript

[-JKP-]

"In this paper, we showed more support for the claim that the VM is written in a natural language and therefore is not a hoax. Although several scholars have found statistical evidence pointing in the same direction, more evidence is needed, particularly to establish whether there is a known language family to which VM can plausibly be assigned."  ---Colin Layfield, Lonneke van der Plas, Michael Rosner, John Abela

Most of the language-related tests of Voynichese that depend on EVA transliterations include a number of fundamental assumptions that can skew the results

For example

EVA converts the c-shapes to e-shapes for mnemonic purposes. Mnemonic text systems almost always depend on converting the VMS glyphs to something that is closer to natural language so it can be more easily remembered. To put it simply: EVA CHANGES Voynichese shapes to be closer to natural language. Many computational attacks assume the vowel-like shapes are vowels.

Unfortunately, one researcher after another uses this mnemonic system (which increases the vowel shapes in the VMS) to test vowel-consonant balance, or to test other aspects of natural language that include vowel-consonant assumptions based on EVA.


For another example

There is no hard evidence yet that token lengths in the VMS = words. Many computational attacks make this assumption, as apparently does this paper.



I saw nothing in this study's methodology that explained why they chose the EVA transliteration, and there was no discussion regarding its limitations for computational attacks or why they accepted its built-in assumptions.

They did acknowledge that they used modern languages for comparison.