[Blog Post] Peter Bakker on the VMS

[MarcoP]

One of the fundamental questions for me is whether it is possible to make a 1-to-1 mapping of Voynich words to plain text words in some language, and arrive at a meaningful text. 

Such a mapping could follow some logic, for example in case of a simple substitution cipher, or no logic at all, in case the words are simply enumerated in a list. While these two cases are very different from the point of view of deciphering, for the present question they are the same. The enumeration option was one of your two examples.

The point is that it does not seem to be too likely to be possible, due to the strange statistics of repeating word sequences.

Thank you for your comments, Rene!
I agree that repetitions make a 1-to-1 mapping of words very unlikely. In particular, the simple fact that the most frequent word is reduplicated as daiin.daiin many times all through the manuscript appears to be incompatible with European languages (e.g. I don't think I have ever seen any occurrence of "et et" in a Latin manuscript).

Something I like in Timm and Schinner's theory is that they addressed the issue of the high reduplication rate. Other solvers tend to ignore it as not deserving an explanation: in English you can have "that that", so everything is totally ordinary. Doh.

This does not mean that all hope is lost. It could be that there are some simple rules why this is the case.
For example, there seem to be no cases of repeating sequences that cross a line break.
(I am sorry, but I writing from memory). In some special cases (I did some substitutions) there were such cases, but then both strings had the line break in the same place.
(I am not sure if I explained that clearly).

I am afraid I cannot follow what you wrote about repetitions and line-breaks and how this suggests the existence of simple rules.
But I agree that the impossibility of the 1-to-1 word mapping solution does not rule out the theoretical possibility of other solutions.

If one compares a manuscript text with a printed version of the same text (as I did You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), one finds that several manuscript-words map into the same printed-word. This is due to common things like:

• hyphenation
  
• inconsistent abbreviation
  
• inconsistent spelling
  
• inconsistent word-spacing
  

On the forum, we discussed some possible evidence of "homographs" i.e. Voynich words that appear to correspond to different plain-text words (e.g. otol).

   

The different dialects mentioned by Nick are even more direct evidence that the same plain-text word could be expressed in more than one way (according to the different sections).
So, if the manuscript is meaningful and spaces correspond to word-spaces, the mapping likely is many-to-many and we are in a much more complex position than a 1-to-1 mapping between words.