A family of grammars for Voynichese

[Mauro]

Hello everybody. I’m a new member, an Italian with a background in electronics engineering (industrial automation sector, now happily retired). I have dabbled from time to time into the Voynich manuscript, expecially from the point of view of statistics and word structure, without ever finding anything useful to report.

 

However, I have recently developed a word grammar or, better, a family of grammars, which I would like to share, together with a comparison with the grammars proposed by ThomasCoon, Zattera and Stolfi. Unfortunately, I have not found a way to format the presentation in a good way to display on the forum, so I have uploaded the .pdf file on Google Drive at this link (sorry for the inconvenience):

 

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The contents of the (short) presentation are:

 

1) INTRODUCTION: mostly concerned in defining how the evaluation of the grammars is made.

2) “BASIC” GRAMMAR: the simplest one, which makes clear how the underlying structure works. It finds 48.7-50.58% of the Voynichese words (depending on the variant of the grammar), with a better efficiency than ThomasCoon and Zattera (efficiency = number of Voynich words found / total words which the grammar can possibly generate).

3) “COMPACT” GRAMMAR: tweaked for efficiency, it’s 3-6 times better than the BASIC grammar, with a small decrease in the words found.

4) “EXTENDED” GRAMMAR: tweaked for coverage, it finds 88.45% of the Voynichese words, while at the same time being simple and reasonably efficient (and the coverage rises to 92.79% if words with ‘rare’ characters such as ‘g’ or ‘v’ etc., which are not used by the grammar, are excluded).

5) APPENDIX: a final consideration and a resume of the data.

 

Apologizing in advance for any mistakes I may have made, I hope you’ll find it interesting, and I will gladly read any answer and comments from the community.