Vord paradigm tool

[Emma May Smith]

A "word model" for the Voynich text is, of course, nothing new. Tiltman created a model many decades ago, and Stolfi's work stands out as an inspiration to many researchers. The question is really why we want such a model. A model should provide us with more than a simple restatement that words exist as strings of glyphs and go beyond bigram frequencies. It should reveal some structure of words. For a natural language (leaving aside the question of nature of the Voynich text) we would look to learn about syllable structure or morphology from such a model.

A word model doesn't need to do everything and it can't. Sometimes models have been assessed on how well they fit the Voynich lexicon: do they generate every possible word and does every possible word they generate occur? This is actually a somewhat poor measure. As Rene has pointed out, gaps occur in natural languages and minimal sets of possible alternations may be impossible to construct. Even minimal pairs of a particular contrast can be difficult. The rules of a language may allow words but do not demand them. This goes even more strongly for frequency: sphere is a phonologically marginal word in English, yet the OED puts it in the same frequency band as "dog" and colour terminology.

A good model explains common observations: why only one gallows glyph per word? why is /d/ before a gallows so rare, but a /d/ after a gallows so common? why is /ch/ so common, but not after /o, y/, except at the beginning of a line? And when we say "explain", we mean not that it provides a cause, but rather it provides a rule. So we might say, in answer to the foregoing questions: "there is only one normal slot for a gallows in a word", and "the slot for a gallows precedes the slot for /d/", and even "/o, y/ before /ch/ is abnormal and not part of regular word formation". These answer still require more explanation, but they take us forward: glyph have slots! slots have order! the final word may be the result of multiple processes!

I've looked into a word model for the Voynich text (thanks to Marco for mentioning) and the results were enlightening. It made me realise that the text can't simply be a unaltered natural language (there must be something more happening) but also that there are strong rules behind word formation and not an arbitrary process. Words certainly weren't formed on the fly, at the whim of the author.