Vord paradigm tool

[pfeaster]

Fully 142/167 of the word tokens are present verbatim in the source.  The remainders are

Shekchdy, tolor, rchdy, omolShey, olkear, otchorol, karaly, dchedeey, Shedyo, otaiil, olalchkalches, qoteedair, darorar, pychedy, tchdar, aldShedy, laiikam, qoetchy, tcheokedeedy, tary, okolkeey, lShlchep, okaoy, rSheody, qoto

The parameters of your experiment were slightly different from mine, apart from your use of fourth-order rather than third-order analysis: I used the "ZL" transcription instead of Takahashi, ignored spaces for calculating matrices, and then inserted spaces only according to whether a given sequence of two glyphs has a space more often than not.  But I'd guess these differences shouldn't affect the results too much.

I just checked to see how many of the word tokens in my third-order sample are present verbatim in the source, and came up with 52/57 (or 53/57 if we count [sheoar], which turns up as a string but not a separate word).  The remainders, other than [sheoar], are:

qokeodar, cheokeedy, dochey, olteodar 

My 52/57 is about 91%, while obelus's 142/167 is about 85%.  I believe the percentage of hapax legomena in "real" Voynichese is about 18%, so a typical excerpt of "real" Voynichese text should only score around 82% at best when compared against the rest of the text.

I'm not sure why the percentage goes down from my third-order sample to obelus's fourth-order sample -- I'd have guessed it would be the other way around.  But it seems that moving beyond these orders for experiments of this kind is likely to yield diminishing returns, as far as simply generating attested words. 

In this rather dry sense, the higher-order matrices descriptively account for all patterns, and provide no explanations.

Like any raw data, they need analysis and interpretation.  Examples of the kind of "rule" we might infer from them could look something like this (ignoring spaces):

• In Currier B, a glyph preceded by e is more likely than usual to be followed by y.
  
• In Currier B, d is more likely to be followed by a than by y if it is preceded by y, r, p, n, or l.
  
• t is more likely to occur if there's another t four, five, or six places before it.
  

Maybe some such "rules" reflect the ability of glyphs to occupy different word slots.  But maybe it's the other way around, and apparent word structure emerges from the application of these "rules."  I'm not sure how best to tell the difference.