A family of grammars for Voynichese

[oshfdk]

Let me re-work the 'syllabary hypothesis' for my example, I hope it will be enough (and the example does not at all implies I want to propose it as a possible actual solution!).

Thank you for explaining this further. If I understand it right, even if we stumble upon the correct grammar, it looks like we don't have any way to tell it apart from incorrect grammars with similar loose predictive power (this is, huge number of possible strings).

I don't know how you identify these grammars. If by some sort of machine learning process, maybe it could be possible to split the words into training and validation subsets? To check whether the grammar learned on a subset of words is as efficient for the rest of the text.

But I wouldn't say there is nothing to gain in exploring the grammars path: after all, Voynich words obviously have a (weird) structure, which probably has some function in the manuscript (or, in the case it's a meaningless text, it is some consequence of the pseudo-random method used to generate the gibberish) and even just finding a class of grammars where we cannot say exactly which is the right one, but we can be confident that one of them is probably the correct one, would be a step forward.

Let's say, hypothetically, we learn that the correct intended grammar for the whole text is A + B + C + D (we can't know this before we know the method used to create the text, so this is a pure thought experiment). Let's say that we know that A can be either 'q' or 'y' or null, etc. for B, C and D. I still don't understand how knowing all these facts would give us anything in terms of identifying the method used to produce the text. The only thing I see is that we will be able to generate new conforming Voynichese words, with no clue about their meaning or function. Maybe we could try to guess something from the number of entries in each slot, but overall I just see no clear path from identifying the correct grammar (which could be impossible in the first place) to identifying the meaning or function.

BTW, do you have any thought about the binomial distribution of word lengths, as identified by Stolfi (if I'm not mistaken)? Does it put some constraints on possible grammars?