A family of grammars for Voynichese

[Mauro]

Interesting, thank you!

At first I was a bit confused as the 'first missing word' did not match mine, but I based the checks on the reference transliteration (RF-1a).

My present thinking (as reflected in the music paper) goes more into the direction of a looped grammar.
I called the result of each loop a 'word chunk'.

However, I do not yet have a good result.

I wondered after first seeing M.Zattera's work, if the efficiency figure is not penalising the results too much.
After all, a perfect word generation rule should not be expected to exist.

But I also don't have a better suggestion.

First of all, I assume you are René Zandbergen: thank you for being interested in my grammars, and most of all thank you for your wounderful website, which has been a key reference for me for many years. I cannot praise it enough.


I did notice you reported 'chtor' as the first word missed by SLOT, I checked 5 or 6 times to be sure I did not make a mistake in syaing it was 'cheky' instead! By the way, 'cheky' can be found by SLOT by adding a "k" in the 11th slot. I have just made a test and this brings the number of words found to 3405 (efficiency is reduced by 6/7). The first missed word becomes 'sheckhy', which would need a "ckh" added to the 11th slot to be found (and then, to go deeper, I guess also "cth" "ckh" etc.).

I like 'word chunk': more intuitive than my 'module', much less charged than Emma May Smith's 'syllable'.

Of course I agree with you about the efficiency figure (see my post #8). Efficiency is (mathematically) the main drawback of the LOOP grammar, but if this is compensated by gaining a truly interesting insight on the word structure it would look much less important.


I also have a some preliminary data for the distribution of words vs. chunks, but I have to work a little more on it because I'm not yet settled on what exactly to put in the 'HEAD', 'LOOP' and 'TAIL' parts of the grammar (and I first need to make my software a little more manageable, at the moment I have to recompile it every time I change a grammar and now I have so many of them that it's becoming unwieldly). Anyway:

About 0% words with zero chunks (they are 'y', 151 occurences;'qy' 3 occurrences;'q' and 'yy' one occurence each)
Words with 1 chunk: < 10%
Words with two chunks: about 50%
Words with three chunks: about 40%
Words with four or more chunks: < 10%

(voynichese.com transcription, words with 'rare' charactes ('g', 'x', 'v', 'z' and 'c', 'h' appearing alone) excluded, 7700 total words remaining)