A family of grammars for Voynichese

[Mauro]

SLOT 1: ch sh y
SLOT 2: eee ee e q a
SLOT 3: o
SLOT 4: iii ii i d 
SLOT 5: y p f k l r s t cth ckh cph cfh n m

Slot 4 looks interesting to me. I cannot think of a context in the manuscript where both i+ and d would appear valid, I wonder what lead to them being grouped together.

Remember that being grouped together means they are alternative one to each other in that position. But d is interesting, I tried with many different characters allowed to move freely (r s t k l m n cth ckh...) and only 'd' did not cluster with all the other 'consonants'.

 Maybe this will be clarified in the per-section grammars.

I hoped that too, but I could come to nothing which was satisfying (the d always seems to cluster by itself though, in both Currier languages, but in different positions). I cannot really say much at the moment, it's been a couples months since I last reasoned on the grammars (in the previous post I just wanted to report a negative), but as promised I'll rummage again into the data and give some examples and thoughts.

 Since these grammars are mutually incompatible (perform poorly on other sections, as you said), probably the generic grammar is a mix of individual grammars.

Yes, surely it is. But I hoped that the grammars of the Currier B sections (which comprises the biggest part of the text) were more similar between themselves and to the 'whole VMS' grammar than they actually turned out to be. But it's also true that the looping mechanism does not help in understanding how much two grammars are different, ie. [a b c d] and [d a b c], when looped, are in practice the same grammar.

Also interesting that o has its own slot. And y appears in two slots, looks like it's the only character that does this. As far as I remember, there used to be some ideas about there being two distinct y glyphs - word initial y and word ending y, that look almost the same, but function differently.

I did not check much the behaviour of o, I'll give it a look tomorrow. y is interesting: all the 'best' grammars calculated on the whole VMS have an y both in the first and the last slot (hundreds of them) and I thought it gave a good support to the initial-y final-y theory. But incredibly, the grammars calculated on each section almost always have just one y. I don't know why: it can be just an artefact of the 'looping', or it may depend on the basic grammar structures I feeded to the Monte Carlo engine as seeds or on the VMS not following after all the inital-y final-y theory.

I think this work is very important for possible deciphering attempts.

I thank you a lot but I'm not that optimistic at this point. Everything progressed well until I hit the usual wall of haziness and endless intractable complications, without any clear foothold in sigh. But at least I think I systematized a bit the field of slot grammars with the critique of the efficiency metric and I explored a bit a pretty interesting and fascinating grammar landscape. If anything of this can be of help to others, I'll be very glad.

For my part, I'll write down the results I got with the study of the sections in a future post (feel free to ask if you want more informations or raw data or whatever), then I'll go on with my current pausing of slot grammars and words chunkification studies, hoping to stumble on some new idea I am actually able to test, someday.