[split] Verbose cipher?

[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.

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.

The most surprising result of such an analysis of the Voynich ms script would be that EVA "[a]" and "[o]" would virtually always occur as part of the above bigrams/trigrams -- they account for virtually all occurrences of [a] and [o]. They would thus have no more independent significance than do "[c]", "[h]", "[i]", or "[n]". This is surprising upon first consideration.

EVA [l] and [r] would still have a restricted independent significance primarily where they occur in vord-initial position, without a preceding [o] or [a]. I calculate approximately 1,300-1,350 such examples of [l] and approx. 400-450 such examples of [r].

I also suppose that according to Koen's schema, [aiir], [oir], and [oiir] should also be treated as single characters or letters. Probably they were simply too rare in the ms text to affect the h1 and h2 values very much, so they weren't worth considering in Koen's initial calculations.

Taking account of the entire resulting inventory of the remaining single characters, plus all of Koen's bigrams, trigrams, and n-grams above, in this way we have produced a character "alphabet" of about 25 values:

[e], [y]
[d], [k], [t]
[s], [l], [r]
[ch], [sh]
[ain], [aiin], [aiiin]
[air], [ar], [al], [am]
[or], [ol]
[ok], [ot], [od]
[qo], [qok], [qot]

Of course there are a handful of additional rare characters/letters as well. But the above inventory should account for the overwhelmingly vast majority of the Voynich ms text.