A family of grammars for Voynichese

[ThomasCoon]

This is great work, Mauro. I think this is the direction that will lead to decipherment. As Koen's great You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. pointed out, it may be difficult to argue that the characters represent a plaintext natural language.

But what the objective statistics of the VMS make clear is:

1. Certain characters prefer different positions in a word (e.g. word-final y, word-initial q, etc.)
   
2. Certain characters prefer groupings with other characters (e.g. ok, or, etc.)
   
3. Certain characters do both of the above things at the same time. (e.g. qo-, qok-, -dy)
   

And that all fits with a cipher hypothesis.

I agree with you 100% that each vord is composed of a series of "fields" or "slots". My best guess is that the presence or absence of certain slots is "input" for a corresponding decipherment table. 

For example, imagine a system where "qokcheedy" would be broken down into q (slot 1) - ok (2) - ch (3) - ee (4) - d (5) - y (Final), and then "12345F" translates into the plaintext letter "r" or "z" or whatever. 

The problem (as you mentioned in post #14) is that nobody knows exactly what the slots are: maybe "ee" is one slot; maybe it's supposed to be two (e+e). Maybe final "-dy" is two units (d+y); maybe they're only meaning-bearing when they're read together as one unit (dy). The Voynich authors would have known how the system works because they invented it - but for us trying to figure it out after-the-fact, it's 100x harder. 

Maybe the VMS encoders threw in "red herring" combinations that have no meaning to further disguise the code - if they did, it will make the code even harder to crack because we don't know which vords are meaningful and which are not. 

And it may even be the case that the authors got so comfortable with the "slot" locations that they started to throw characters into slots where they don't normally belong (for example: maybe "qodchy" on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is actually "qokchy"). Again, we don't know.

Well, please keep going Mauro. I hope you solve it