Old Polish (geoffreycaveney's theory)

[geoffreycaveney]

Entirely correct, Rene. For me the greatest value in the experiment is that it negates the argument that Voynichese words don't contain enough information to be real language. They do, but the information is just watered down. 
Additionally, as I mentioned before, the original post contained two mistakes which helped increase entropy:
- the entire VM was used, not just one section 
- a number of spaces were accidentally removed 
At this moment I am working on a revision which should set everything straight. I will look at HA, HB, Q13 and Q20 separately. I just finished the optimal list for Herbal A and it looks completely different.

Koen, I see a basic problem with this new idea of producing separate verbose ciphers to maximize entropy in each of four different sections of the ms text separately: If you are going to claim as a result that the "best" verbose cipher is completely different for each separate section, then this would logically lead to a hypothesis that each section is essentially composed with completely different writing systems, that just happen to use the same set of glyphs. This strikes me as quite implausible, to say the least. Does anyone really believe it is plausible that in the sequence "[okeody]", in one section the meaningful segments are ok+e+od+y, but in another section it is segmented as o+k+eo+dy, and possibly in yet another section it is rather segmented as o+ke+o+d+y? If anyone believes that this can actually be the case, then let's just be honest and admit that there's no hope of deciphering the text of the manuscript, if the script actually represents so many essentially entirely different writing systems.

I think the original decision to seek the verbose cipher with the best possible entropy and conditional entropy statistics for the entire manuscript text was correct.