A family of grammars for Voynichese

[Mauro]

One can of course do several things, and as usual it is unpractical to try everyting.

Giving more weight to frequent words in the score can be achieved by not counting the number of word types, but word tokens. So if a word occurs 200 times, count it as 200.



Alternatively, one can leave words that appear only once out of consideration altogether.



One could make refinements using conditional slots. Example: a certain slot can only be used if a certain other slot is also used. Or the opposite: a certain slot cannot be used if a certain other slot is also used. This immediately makes it considerably more complicated. But I have a feeling that this would improve the success.

That's indeed a possible way, but I think it's equivalent to define more and more complex symbols (ie.: if an 'iii' forces the subsequent use of the ['n', 'm'] slot, looks the same as defining 'iiin' and 'iiim' as symbols and using them instead). Another thing one could make is to use multiple grammars, ie. one for 'aiin-like' word chunks and one another for 'ee?y-like' chunks (or whatever), then choose one of the available 'templates' before start building the word (a slot without symbols, but with 'pointers' to the sub-grammars). I would have even given it a try if not that it's a painful software work.

As you said, many several things, unpractical to try everytrhing.

The real mystery is IMHO that all this is not supposed to exist.

Which language exhibits a slot structure?

Risking a Dunning-Kruger, I'd say "none that I know of". Only semitic languages (not that I know much about them!) have something vaguely similar in the form of the tri-consonantal word roots + different infixes/affixes, but the Voynich system looks much more developed and much more rigid. Agglutinating (or better, 'synthetic' languages, but 'synthetic' can create confusion in this context) have a kind of 'word' structure too, but (always from my limited knowledge) it does not look much Voynichese-like to me, and an agglutinating language in late medieval Europe looks farfetched anyway (with the possible exception of Hungarian and Suomi, languages I don't know at all, but which seem to have words much more varied in form than Voynichese). A constructed language (expecially a 'philosophical' language) could fit the bill, ie. Volapük builds words in quite a rigid way. Possible, (well, maybe not something as complex as Volapük..) but in all effects equivalent to using a nomenclator cipher, extremely hard to crack without having clues external to the transcribed text.

There are examples in other areas, e.g. the trivial case of numbers. You just need four (identical) slots to cover the numbers 1 - 9999. Trivial of course, but it becomes more interesting when using the Greek or Arabic numbering systems that uses letters of the alpbahet.

Even more interesting are Roman numerals, which would benefit from the conditional slots mentioned above.

Numbers (or, mainly numbers + other features) could fit very well. In the years I actually tried two or three times to 'decode' Voynichese words as Roman numbers, with the usual endless running around in circles to nowhere, but numbers are decidedly a possibility. I'm pretty sure you already know P. Feaster's "Ruminations on the Voynich" article (I just found it yesterday while browsing VNinja forums hehe), a lot of informations about how numbers (+ features) were written in medieval times.

The one thing I am reasonable certain about is that the MS text was not created by someone setting up a slot system and actually using it to generate the words.

It should have been something else that ended up being equivalent.
This works both for meaningful and meaningless text.

Oh yes!