Ambiguous Spaces

[pfeaster]

The best way of handling ambiguous spacing probably depends on just what you're looking to investigate and how.  But if you're approaching "vords" as words in a linguistic sense, you might want some approach that would preserve the ambiguity all the way through to your results, since it could provide some clues of its own.

After all, ambiguous spacing isn't limited to the VMs, and in other cases it often seems to reflect real ambiguities in the structure of a language.  Consider French texts from around the time of the VMs (and for some time afterwards), which frequently take an ambivalent approach to spacing between definite articles or prepositions and the nouns that follow them.  Sometimes the article or preposition is written together with the following noun as though it were a prefix, sometimes it's written with a definite space, and sometimes it's hard to judge whether there's a space or not.  The presence or absence of a space doesn't seem to have been governed strictly by any set rules as it is today (e.g., le vin but l'eau).  And this inconsistency doesn't apply everywhere -- just in specific situations that were legitimately ambiguous until they got resolved by later orthographic convention.

If Voynichese behaves similarly, perhaps it's for the same general reason (though the specifics could be very different).  And my own impression is that it does behave similarly -- at least, insofar as situations where we find ambiguous spacing seem largely to match situations where we also find inconsistent but unambiguous spacing.

That said, it seems these cases also correlate pretty well with specific glyph adjacencies -- that is, whenever a common-ish "vord" contains certain glyphs next to each other, it will typically be found with a break between them, without a break between them, and with an ambiguous sort-of-break between them, all in loosely consistent ratios.  That's admittedly not the case with French.

Representative examples include [ra] [r.a] [r,a] and [lch] [l.ch] [l,ch] for adjacencies and [oraiin] [or.aiin] [or,aiin] and [olchedy] [ol.chedy] [ol,chedy] for "vords."

Apart from that, if you're analyzing word morphologies, treating all ambiguous spaces as "real" spaces will risk giving you non-valid truncated forms, while ignoring all ambiguous spaces will risk giving you non-valid concatenated forms.  Does one of those outcomes seem likely to create more problems for you than the other?

I'm not sure your option 4 would leave you "with the question which set of results is correct" -- I'd think it would give you two sets of results that would both contain some errors, but that would also share a lot of overlap.  Maybe you could be confident about any conclusions that are true for both sets of results while taking any other conclusions that are true for only one or the other set of results with a grain of salt?  If you were looking at word morphologies, for example, you could be skeptical of longer structures that occur only when ignoring ambiguous spaces, and also of shorter structures that occur only when treating all ambiguous spaces as "real."

Personally, I've usually gone with the "try it both ways" approach, but it's a tough call.  Whatever you decide to do, I've missed reading your work at "Agnostic Voynich" and will definitely look forward to seeing where your thoughts have been taking you lately!