(29-11-2024, 07:36 PM)Mauro wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think you can find all the answers in my post #14. For an example of how functional element could be identified, see the note in small characters at the end of the point "It's a sillabary".
It's exactly the analysis in post #14 that I have troubles understanding. I still have a very poor comprehension of how a grammar relates to potential features of the text. If I understand this correctly, any list of words can be approximated (?) via any of multiple grammars incompatible between themselves (in a sense that they can generate quite different sets of strings). As far as I can see, almost all proposed grammars generate vastly larger number of word types than those that are actually contained in the manuscript. In this case, I suppose, if it's possible to compute the overlap between all the strings predicted by grammar A and all the strings predicted by grammar B, this overlap would probably represent a very tiny fraction of both spaces. Does this mean that either grammar is likely a very poor model of the underlying text?
[Edit] My understanding of using grammars for Voynichese originally was that they are just to show that there is some structure to the words. For this grammars serve as a good tool. However, unless there is a very tight grammar that, say, covers 95% of the text and only produces less than 10x the number of known words types, I have little understanding of what we can learn by further refining these loose grammars.
Quote:It’s a syllabary. I actually tried a little to investigate more, and I even found a reasonable way to convert fields to syllables, but then I realized the most frequent word in Voynich (daiin) has 2 chunks, which would be two syllables, while in all the languages for which I have statistics I can trust (English, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Classic Greek, Koine Greek, (rather old) German, (rather old) French) all the most frequent words, by far, have only one syllable. On the upside, if it’s a syllabary, the chances of finding a solution do not decrease much beyond the baseline (just divide by the number of all possible languages). The ‘decoding’ worked roughly like this: chunks such as ‘aain’encode CV/VC/V syllables (the slots can be arranged to get two fields with about 3 bits of information, enough for vowels, and one field for a consonant (with ~14 possible consonants, which would be +- enough for Latin, much less for English). Chunks such as ‘Cedy’ would encode CVC syllables: it’s possible to get a field for 5 vowels (but only in the first syllables, choices are limited to three after the first) and two fields for the consonants (but one of them is limited to about 9 choices).
Thank you for singling out this part of your post as the example, I'll copy it here so that it's easier to find.