Bit-level Geometry: A deterministic discovery of Voynichese building blocks

[Jorge_Stolfi]

In simple terms, I've shared a mathematically grounded tool, designed to identify the true structural building blocks (e.g. prefixes, root words and suffixes), without having to rely on human guesswork (prone to bias).

That claim is questionable already at the theoretical level, because only a vanishingly small subset of all languages admits a factorization L = A B where any "prefix" string from the set A can be concatenated with any "suffix" string from set B. 

The structure of the vocabulary of a natural language is more like the union (and not the disjoint union) of dozens or hundreds of separate languages L = L1 ∪ L2 ∪ ... Ln, where potentially each term can be factored into the product of two languages Li = Ai Bi.  

But that "potentially" must be strongly stressed, because this model cannot be applied in practice.  First, the lexicon extracted from any finite text in the language will miss many of the pairs  ai bi from the product Ai Bi, thus preventing the recognition of that product as one of the terms.  Second, many of those pairs will be missing even in the "ideal" complete lexicon, because of semantic constraints.  And third, phonetic and spelling effects typically would require splitting the language into hundreds of product terms, making the identification of those terms highly questionable.

In your example, for instance, the "able" words actually belong to several categories depending on the pair of suffixes.  Thus the prefixes A1 = {"speak", "pass", "read", ...} can pair with the suffixes B1 = {"", "able"}; but the prefixes A2 = {"fus", "coerc", "collaps"} must be paired with B2 = {"e", "ible"), while A3 = {"abat", "abus", ...} should pair with B3 = {"e", "able"}, and A4 ={"abdic", "abomin", ...} should pair with B4 = {"ate", "able"}, and so on.  And some verbs, like "exist", "remain", "comprise" would not have "able" forms even in principle.

If you didn't speak English, you might chop that word up, guessing the blocks were "unb" - "eliev" - "able". When actually: ...

Why is your "actually" alternative factorization more correct than the "non-speaker" one?  Because of semantics?  But we don't know the semantics of the Voynichese words...

The math proves exactly where the author(s) of the manuscript connected their building blocks.

I bet it does not.  Math may provide a set of prefixes, cores, and suffixes that have certain favorable statistical properties (like most previous word models had), but it cannot prove that the Author thought of the words in terms of those parts.

All the best, --stolfi