A family of grammars for Voynichese

[Jorge_Stolfi]

If ee is a bench then is ii a bench as well?

Including ii as a bench ("X") would allow words like iiky or iiody, which do not seem to occur.  Thus I accept i, ii, and iii only as parts of the coda ("N") elements, which in the CMC model can occur only at the end of the word (apart from following "O", maybe).

Do we have any idea of the dating difference between original and retraced inks?

I have no firm answer for that.  However, the motivation for retracing presumably was that the original traces had faded to the point that they were hard to read.  Thus I suppose it must have been several decades to a couple of centuries after the original writing.  That would be consistent with the Retracer being ignorant not only about the meaning of the text and figures, but even about the Voynichese alphabet -- as indicated by the nature of his mistakes.

On the other hand, I doubt that the Jesuits cared enough about this book to commission such a restoration.  Thus I would guess that the major restoration happened between ~1470 and ~1630.  The worried owner could have been Marci, Barschius, Sinapius, ... or someone else before them.

A little struggle for me is where the ee bench is in an eee because an e suffix could belong to the preceding character giving e ee or following this ee bench giving ee e. How does one know what character gets the suffix?

Good observation; indeed my definition of "element" is ambiguous in that point.  My parser breaks the ambiguities as follows: if the next two EVA letters are ch, sh, or ee, followed by a single e, then those three letters are one element.  If the ch, sh, or ee is followed by two or more e, then the next element is just the two letters.

That is, 

• chdy is {ch}{d}{y}
  
• chedy is {che}{d}{y}
  
• cheedy is {ch}{ee}{d}{y}
  
• cheeedy is {ch}{eee}{d}{y} (not {che}{ee}{d}{y}) which would be the other possibility)
  
• cheeeedy is {ch}{ee}{ee}{d}{y} (not {che}{eee}{d}{y})
  

This ambiguity is only relevant for the CMC model if there is a {ch} or {sh} followed by four e in a row, as in the last example; because, with my disamb rule, the result has three benches, which is forbidden, instead of two, which is OK.  But I don't see any such word in my transcription. There are several words with four e, like deeees, but that is not ambiguous since the only possible parsing is {d}{ee}{ee}{s} - which is CMC-valid.

All the best, and Happy New Year! --stolfi