Mathematical Attempt to Remove Impact of Alphabet Differences

[MichelleL11]

So if I bring a person who speaks Kabardian, would he be able to read Voynichese, or what? What's the practical outcome?

Although this isn't really what I was hoping to accomplish with this string (which was to just get some opinions about the validity of the published method to try to be able to compare differing alphabets) I am happy to respond with my thoughts.

1) IF we conclude that these "matches" from Voynichese to the Caucasian family is more than mere pattern coincidence (despite having "hits" on languages that are quite diverse), I would look to what form one or more of these languages had at the time of the carbon dating.  In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. this conversation was started.  Certainly, one or more of these languages must have had a written tradition at the time?

2) Once a decent amount of the language at the time is available, there could then be an attempt, if someone was an advocate of the "natural language" approach to the VM, to match the sounds of that language to the glyphs in the manuscript -- of course, that brings with it the downsides of this approach, the greatest of which, in my view, is accommodating the lack of regular multiple word pattern repetition (strings of whole words, repeated) that would be expected to be seen in a corpus the size of the MS if it was a natural language - I am, of course, happy to hear how I could be misinterpreting that data, as I am not a linguist. 

OR

3) It could be hypothesized that a Caucasian language was the basis for a cipher where the strong internal word patterns are reflective of the underlying language (e.g. it is a 1:1 substitution -- which is, based on research into cipher history, the most common understanding of what a "cipher" was at the time).  This is supposed to be the big payback for doing this matching work, right?  Thus, the lack of whole word pattern repetition could be accomplished through some sort of in page transposition of the output of the 1:1 substitution.  Again, I understand that such "in page transposition" would be appropriate at the time of the carbon dating (based on later discussions of their earlier existence) -- but, unfortunately actual examples of such have either not survived or are yet to be discovered.

This approach does have the advantage of invoking the "cipher process" to accommodate other unusual features of the manuscript such as the line as a unit and paragraph as a unit unusual statistics.

Needless to say, issues remain with explaining how a manuscript with a Caucasian language basis ended up in Europe and including Central European imagery (e.g. the Zodiac-like images) - but I suppose the easiest way to explain this is the movement of one or more people that speak that language to Europe, where relatively easier access to the European imagery for inclusion at the manuscripts creation would be available.   

So those are my thoughts on possible "practical" outcomes.

But what I'd really like to know is whether the mathematical approach of Jaskiewicz has any validity.