A family of grammars for Voynichese

[oshfdk]

You are perfectly right: the pattern-matching algorithm is 'greedy', it will stop at the first match it finds. Actually the algorithm is more sophisticated and I could go on and find all the possible alternative matches too, but I think this would not be much useful. It's one of those things which would be very easy to explain face-to-face just by scribbling on a piece of paper, but it's not easy to explain in written form. I try my best.

It does not matter because, after all, the grammar structure univocally determines the chunk structure (even if there many be many possible alternative 'chunkings'). We could easily re-arrange the grammar to get the alternative chunkings, for instance in LOOP-4 all the 'consonants' [d, k, l, r...] etc. are at the end, so a word such as 'daiin' is chunked as [d] + [aiin]. But I could just put that slot at the beginning, and 'daiin' would become [daii] + [n].

So, what discriminates between one of the two alternatives forms of LOOP-4? It's the total number of chunks, Nchunktypes, found by chunkifying each grammar: I actually made a test with the 'consonants' at the beginning (just past the [q, ch, sh, y] slot) and it finds 609 Nchunktypes, so it's slightly worse than the standard LOOP-4 at 606 (but a very viable grammar nonetheless, I guess).  I also tested with 'consonants' both at the beginning and the end and it resulted in ~675 chunks (I don't remember exactly).

About 'separable' words: I don't think the concept is even meaningful in the context of slot grammars: just duplicate any grammar and it will find all the separable words it had been missing before. Seen from another point of view: it's not that defining a word as 'separable' excuses the original grammar for not having found it

After reading this reply I realized that the (loop) grammar matching mechanics are more complicated than I thought, which probably explains my persistent confusion. I cannot really understand your results so far, but I'm looking forward to new updates, especially those a bit less technical in nature