A family of grammars for Voynichese

[Mauro]

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 would say it in a different way. Finding a possibly correct grammar class would be a major achievement, because it gives a possible explanation of a remarkable feature of the manuscript. This is what Stolfi, ThomasCoon, Zattera etc. etc., and me too, lately, have been trying to do since years and years. Choosing which of all those classes is the best is of course a hard problem, but a grammar class could be found which stands out as 'explanatory power', and this would be a big step forward already.

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.

I don't know too: all the innumerable discussions and comparisons on different grammars (including those in this thread) serve this purpose. Using AI is a very nice idea, I actually had fancied to ask ChatGTP4 to generate for me a random sample of Voynichese and see what happens, never did it because I never subscribed to ChatGPT (I have a strong allergy for subscriptions) and because it works in a way that it could have easily generated text by simply assembling together actual Voynich snippets, which is rather trivial.

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.

Nor I do see any clear, practicable path. As I tried to make clear in the, at this time notorious, post #14. But even those meager considerations are a step forward nonetheless, well, at least for me, ie.: I did not think it possible the Voynich could be a sillabary, now I think it could be. I thought the Timm & Schinner "copy and modify" hypothesis was consistent with most of the available data, now I think that that hypothesis is difficult to reconcile with the LOOP grammar (supposinjg it has some validity).

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?

Yes, I have some opinions and no, I don't think they can constrain the possible grammars. But (as usual with me, I'm sorry) it's a rather long explanation, and being it mostly off-topic here, I'll send you instead a PM later.