11-01-2021, 11:40 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-01-2021, 12:19 AM by Vladimir.
Edit Reason: more details
)
All right, i absolutely understand your concerns about the encoding -- but let me return back (for a moment) to the primary point of the article.
It seems (from this discussion) that the main point of the article is the proposed encoding system, but it is not, and i'm quite afraid that this encoding "kidnapped" or overshadowed the primary points of the article (and the fact that the encoding part can be even deleted from the article without any harm as it is part of the discussion).
The main point the article tries to show is -- despite all the unknowns in the manuscript -- there seems to be a rule set for combining some of the glyphs together when they co-occur. Also, by analysis, it seems that the glyphs that can create larger compounds are graphically very simple and the assumed resulting compounds possess their graphical traits (therefore these could be understood as ligatures). (But if this is indeed true, many of the glyphs would disappear from the alphabet leaving it quite small -- this raises a question for any possible explanation.)
This observation stemmed from an observation that Voynich "letters" behave differently than anything we've seen yet (except the Torsten Timms artificially created texts) and even that some of the voynich "letters" behave differently even in the context of the manuscript itself. (I've edited the part "What is the point ..." above to reflect this a little more, i hope, for anyone reading from the beginning).
That is the the point of the article, so i'm a little bit sad and happy at the same time, as the only negative feedback was for the encoding but not for the ligatures part.
The aim of the proposed encoding should have been explained better and it's point was to propose explanation /why/ auto-citation phenomenon does not necessarily mean the text is gibberish hoax. But i will make this more clear i guess (if the proposed encoding part remains). At the same time, it explains how a small alphabet can be used to effectively encode a plain text and still look like gibberish.
The current plan -- and it is one of the most horrible things that are in my plan -- is to indeed write a full length manuscript in the encoding system and test Zipf, entropy along with other properties, so we can see, whether it fits or not.
(Just for some laugh: for sure, we wrote a brute-force program that went through few billions of combinations testing all possible ways for ligatures and their substitutions and found a latin plain-text by this system with use of the default Trithemius table shown above, however, the plain text was not that long to prove anything so i discarded the result and cannot find it anywhere now)
It seems (from this discussion) that the main point of the article is the proposed encoding system, but it is not, and i'm quite afraid that this encoding "kidnapped" or overshadowed the primary points of the article (and the fact that the encoding part can be even deleted from the article without any harm as it is part of the discussion).
The main point the article tries to show is -- despite all the unknowns in the manuscript -- there seems to be a rule set for combining some of the glyphs together when they co-occur. Also, by analysis, it seems that the glyphs that can create larger compounds are graphically very simple and the assumed resulting compounds possess their graphical traits (therefore these could be understood as ligatures). (But if this is indeed true, many of the glyphs would disappear from the alphabet leaving it quite small -- this raises a question for any possible explanation.)
This observation stemmed from an observation that Voynich "letters" behave differently than anything we've seen yet (except the Torsten Timms artificially created texts) and even that some of the voynich "letters" behave differently even in the context of the manuscript itself. (I've edited the part "What is the point ..." above to reflect this a little more, i hope, for anyone reading from the beginning).
That is the the point of the article, so i'm a little bit sad and happy at the same time, as the only negative feedback was for the encoding but not for the ligatures part.
The aim of the proposed encoding should have been explained better and it's point was to propose explanation /why/ auto-citation phenomenon does not necessarily mean the text is gibberish hoax. But i will make this more clear i guess (if the proposed encoding part remains). At the same time, it explains how a small alphabet can be used to effectively encode a plain text and still look like gibberish.
The current plan -- and it is one of the most horrible things that are in my plan -- is to indeed write a full length manuscript in the encoding system and test Zipf, entropy along with other properties, so we can see, whether it fits or not.
(Just for some laugh: for sure, we wrote a brute-force program that went through few billions of combinations testing all possible ways for ligatures and their substitutions and found a latin plain-text by this system with use of the default Trithemius table shown above, however, the plain text was not that long to prove anything so i discarded the result and cannot find it anywhere now)