My thoughts on the VMS

[ThomasCoon]

Thomas wrote: I find it highly interesting that you can predict where certain vords will be.

I didn't break out the wine bottle until I was able to predict twelve in a row. It got to the point where I could say, "This will go to the starred-text pages and nowhere else," or "This is a zodiac word," or "This page should have a word starting with __ somewhere in the middle of the second line," or "This will show up on the small-plant pages, probably the leaf section," etc.

It wasn't possible to do this until about 40% of the words had been mapped and, even then, only in a very limited way. After about 60% had been mapped, it was easier to see the patterns, and to appreciate how much work went into laying down the text. But, I still haven't broken out the champagne because I only have an inkling of what some of them mean. Finding them and predicting them is a big step, but it's not a translation.

Wow! That's very enlightening! It sounds like you will be able to break out that champagne before too long - maybe a next step would be to identify parts of speech (nouns, verbs, etc.) if possible, and then see which properties all "verbs" have in common? Whatever the case, this is fascinating work  

In terms of philosophy... I did the same thing most people do when I first encountered the VMS. I tried applying different languages. I'm familiar enough with western languages and some of the Asian languages (Korean, Chinese, Japanese) to approach it this way and noticed that ancient Mediterranean languages, especially the Semitic ones, a few old eastern European languages, and Asian languages like Boa, fit the structure of the VMS better than most western European languages. But somewhere along the way I realized this might be an unproductive way to approach it. Not only have many tried, but there are thousands of languages (including extinct ones) and it could take forever to figure out which one it is, especially if the spaces (or some of them) are fake.

So I took a different road. I decided, why not just learn Voynichese? If it does turn out to be a natural language, it will become evident. If it's a constructed language, this will be evident also. The advantage of learning Voynichese, rather than cherry-picking languages and trying to impose them on the text, is that it encompasses both possibilities (and a few others) within the same methodology.

Brilliant idea to learn Voynichese, and definitely a unique approach. The thought to do that never crossed my mind - I started by making no assumptions about the text and just copied it, page by page, waiting for realizations to emerge ("this prefix keeps repeating" - "these letters always appear together" - etc.). Both of our approaches are grounded on observation and analysis, it seems!