The daiin

[geoffreycaveney]

I feel fairly strongly that "ain" should be analyzed without the "d" because there are many glyphs preceding the "ain" sequence. Get a grasp of "ain" first and then look at the letters in front, but not only the "d", the other ones too, so the pattern can be understood in context.

I must say, it was pretty thrilling to read Koen's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. this summer about his experiment with ngrams, where one of the end results was some solid support for each in the series "a + 0~3i + line glyph" being one grapheme. I've been waiting for an experiment like that identifies ngrams with a high likelihood of being single graphemes ever since I read your old blog post about Janus pairs. I smell a breakthrough. I digress.

If indeed the VMs is an encoding of a natural written language plaintext, and if indeed "aiin" is one letter, that would make "daiin" likely to represent a two-letter word or abbreviation. It might be worthwhile to ask ourselves what common two-letter words or abbreviations, in any of the written languages of the time and place of the VMs's creation, are not uncommonly (but not usually) found reduplicated in written texts? "Etc.", comes immediately to mind, though it's three letters. But I give this only as an example of the type of pattern to look for. This is making a lot of assumptions, though, not least of which is that the VMs author spelled and/or abbreviated words (prior to and apart from encrypting them) in a known standard way.

Indeed, Koen's blog post that you link to above is fascinating. (It should be noted that Marco contributed significantly to the results there as well.) Has that particular topic been discussed in its own thread on this forum?

Summary of the main result of Koen's blog post for those who don't have the time or inclination to wade through it:

If one selectively considers each of the following character groups as a single character or letter, one transforms the ms text such that both its "h1" character entropy and its "h2" conditional character entropy (one critical problem with the Voynich ms text) are much more in line with typical h1 and h2 values of many natural language texts, in particular for European languages:

[ch], [sh]
[ain], [aiin], [aiiin]
[air], [ar], [al], [am]
[or], [ol]
[ok], [ot], [od]
[qo], [qok], [qot]

These substitutions -- treating each of the above character groups as a single character or letter -- generate an "h2" conditional character entropy of 3.01 and an "h1" character entropy of 4.12, which are actually within the normal range for many European natural language texts.