Comparing the Voynich by Word Position Profiles

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Do you think we cannot squeeze the transliterations anymore?

I believe that we won't get much from just computing statistics and looking at them.  To make progress we must make specific hypotheses and then compute statistics, simulations, etc that are best suited to confirm or reject those hypotheses. 

The test you just did could confirm or reject the hypothesis that Voynichese is one of the languages you used AND it was written with its official spelling system AND spaces were faithfully preserved by the Scribe and transcriber AND it is encrypted with a simple (1 letter)=(1 EVA glyph) substitution cipher.  The test rejected that hypothesis.  But it would have been unnecessary, since we already know that the token and lexeme length distributions of Voynichese do not match those of those languages.  

As you may know, I have my own hypothesis about the nature of Voynichese and the contents of the book.  That hypothesis passed several tests, but they were not tight enough to convince the unbelievers.  I am still looking for better tests.

If you believe that it could be an European language in cipher, then you should state that hypothesis in a way that allow all the perturbing possibilities that were excluded above.  As a minimum you must assume that word spaces in the transcription file are mostly wrong, because otherwise the hypothesis immediately fails the length distribution test.  

And it would be prudent to relax the (1 letter)=(1 EVA glyph) assumption too.  Since the author invented a new alphabet, one cannot assume that he followed the official spelling system.  If I had to transcribe a book in Arabic or Hebrew, for instance (knowing the language or not), I would write down all vowels, not just the long ones.

So the challenge is, what sort of statistics would be best for confirming or refuting this kind of hypothesis?  Seems a tough problem...

All the best, --jorge