A family of grammars for Voynichese

[Mauro]

Just very briefly, I would see one of the main purposes of 'looping' to be to avoid having the same character in several slots. This does not seem to be achieved, and I suspect (just guessing) that this is the result of trying to achieve a too high coverage.

Trying to achieve too high a coverage could indeed be the problem. I remember you already remarked this here some time ago, and I actually made some tests by considering only the word types which appear a minimum number of times in the text (just hapax legomenas make up ~69% of the word types), which automatically decreases coverage (and may help with scribal/transcription errors). But I did not find anything which stood out as possibly significant.

I think that one of the main problems with the Naibbe approach (which the slot approach does not suffer) is the need to be able to split words into parts, where the different possibilities for each part are somewhat limited in number. I don't think it can be done. Even a short slot system will easily generate large numbers of such apparent parts. No need to list them...

My approach too, ultimately, aimed to split words in chunks, in the hope that the chunks could be the basic units of the encoding method (or of the meaningless text generator, or whatever). I tried to do this with the Nbits metric, while the Naibbe approach used (if I'm not mistaken) a trial-and-error strategy. I would frame this generic approach like this: under the hypotheses VMS words are composed of chunks (which may, or may not, be true), is it possible to reconstruct objectively what those chunks are? It's not at all clear to me if this is mathematically possible and under which conditions, ie. a text like [qok qokedy edy qok edyqok edyedy qokqok] looks readily tonekizable as [qok, edy], while a jumble of random characters is obviously hopeless. The VMS lies somewhere between. Natural languages lie somewhere between too, and in this case they lend itself to be tokenized, in syllables (*), but I can't really say if this also the case for the VMS, or what the objective function could be, nor if it's possible to find a tokenization scheme which stands out above all others (which I failed to find with my looping grammars and Nbits). As you say, it might well be impossible.

(*) I actually made some tests of the 'looping slot grammar' approach on natural languages, using grammars inspired to the onset-nucleus-coda structure of phonetic syllables. Iirc it worked reasonably well for Latin and Italian, not as well with English.