(10-06-2026, 09:37 PM)quimqu wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
A note on your observation that the "strongest signal" involves the "expansion" series — ain/aiin/aiiin, qokey/qokeey, shedy/sheedy. I would describe these as similar rather than as expansions, because at the stroke level the modification is the same as in other substitutions:
- "ch" → "sh": one stroke added to the curve. Transcribed as a character substitution.
- "in" → "iin": one stroke added (another minim). Transcribed as a character expansion.
- "edy" → "eedy": one stroke added (another "e" curve). Transcribed as a character expansion.
All three are the same physical operation — adding one stroke. The transcription system represents the first as substitution and the other two as expansion. But on the parchment, the scribe is doing the same thing in each case. The distinction between "substitution" and "expansion" is an artifact of the transcription, not a property of the writing.
This is why in Timm & Schinner 2020 (p. 9) both operations are described under the same rule — 'Replace one or more glyphs by similar ones.' The ligature 'ch' consists of two 'e'-glyphs connected by a dash, so adding an additional 'e'-glyph leading to 'cheol' from 'chol' is the same kind of modification as changing 'ch' to 'sh'.
You can see the relations between similar word types in the global word frequencies:
"For instance, in most cases, words with 'sh' are less frequent than the corresponding variant using 'ch'. Also words using 'p' or 'f' instead of 'k' and 't' are generally less frequent. Similar relations can be described for words using a 'a' instead of 'o', 'ee' instead of 'e' etc. Furthermore, it seems that if a word is spelled similarly to 'daiin', 'ol' or 'chedy', it is more frequent than a word, which is spelled in a less similar way. To quantify this effect, the edit distance, defined as the number of steps required to transform two words into each other, can be used. For instance, it is possible to transform 'daiin' into 'dain' by deleting one i-glyph and into 'dair' by deleting an 'i' and by replacing 'n' with 'r'. ...
These observations make it possible to predict the occurrence and the frequency of similarly spelled words. For instance, if it is known that 'chedy' is frequent, it is possible to predict that 'shedy' is also frequently used although less frequently than 'chedy'. And if we know that 'ychy' only occurs four times it is possible to predict that a glyph group 'ochy' should also exist and that the groups 'ychdy', 'yshy' and 'osheedy' probably occur less than four times.
The grid reveals that the words of the VMS are connected to each other. It is possible to generate another word from the word pool by replacing a glyph by a similar one, or by adding or deleting a glyph. How was it possible to construct a language with "generated" words and to write a text containing over 37,000 words with determinable word frequencies? Was the scribe counting the words he was writing? This seems very unlikely. A better explanation would be the assumption that it is an unintended side effect of the manufacturing or encoding process that similarly spelled words occur with predictable frequencies." (Timm 2014, p. 6f).
With other words, similar words co-occur in the Voynich text and therefore have similar word frequencies. The global "glyph distributions" are caused by the local context-dependent behavior.