30-10-2020, 04:35 PM
Koen, I thought of you and your entropy-increasing ngram substitution experiments when I read this paper. I can see you recommending people who don't quite understand your work first read Lindemann & Bowern 2020 for some background. In fact, I think L&B should be required reading for anyone who posts a VMs theory that assumes a natural language plaintext (written out *or* conventionally abbreviated), or a simple substitution cipher. L&B explains fairly convincingly why scribal abbreviations, colloquialisms, dialect / register variations, and novel writing systems cannot possibly account for how predictable and rigid Voynichese glyph placement is.
These are the lines I'm thinking along these days: systematic but idiosyncratic lossy compression. I'm thinking of notebook jottings over an extended period of time, from one person to himself, composed of ungrammatical, barely legible words written line-by-line. Enough information to jog the writer's memory, but not enough for anyone else to unambiguously figure out what the writer meant. Dotless Arabic and cursive Chinese characters are good historical comparisons. A manuscript written in either would probably not be hard for the original writer to read aloud. But if this same manuscript were found years later, stripped of author or cultural context, it's very possible two different readers would read it two very different ways, with two mutually exclusive meanings.
Wildstyle graffiti makes for an interesting modern parallel, though it's never been used for long-form writing. Wildstyle is very legible to the writer, or to anyone who watches a time-lapse video of him writing it. But being able to look at someone else's wildstyle piece and figure out what it says takes a lot of practice. Legible to those in-the-know, illegible to those not.
cbowern wrote:this may indicate the loss of phonemic distinctions from the underlying language
These are the lines I'm thinking along these days: systematic but idiosyncratic lossy compression. I'm thinking of notebook jottings over an extended period of time, from one person to himself, composed of ungrammatical, barely legible words written line-by-line. Enough information to jog the writer's memory, but not enough for anyone else to unambiguously figure out what the writer meant. Dotless Arabic and cursive Chinese characters are good historical comparisons. A manuscript written in either would probably not be hard for the original writer to read aloud. But if this same manuscript were found years later, stripped of author or cultural context, it's very possible two different readers would read it two very different ways, with two mutually exclusive meanings.
Wildstyle graffiti makes for an interesting modern parallel, though it's never been used for long-form writing. Wildstyle is very legible to the writer, or to anyone who watches a time-lapse video of him writing it. But being able to look at someone else's wildstyle piece and figure out what it says takes a lot of practice. Legible to those in-the-know, illegible to those not.