11-06-2026, 04:24 AM
(10-06-2026, 08:42 PM)Torsten wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In the Latin alphabet, "p" and "b" share a circle + bar but have completely different distributional contexts. In the VMS, your measurements show that glyph pairs sharing stroke structure — ch/sh (0.13), k/t (0.09), p/f (0.11) — have nearly identical distributional contexts. Visual similarity predicts distributional interchangeability. That relationship doesn't exist in writing systems encoding natural language. However, it does exist in the Voynich text.
Letters with similar shapes in "classical" alphabets -- Phoenician, Demotic, Greek, Latin, etc. -- have wildly different origins; that is why they have very different statistics. The same "feature" holds for later alphabets inspired by them.
But alphabets constructed from scratch -- like Shavian, Inukitut, and Hangul -- often intentionally used similar shapes for similar sounds, according to logical rules. Like a certain graphical detail systematically used to distinguish voiced from unvoiced consonants (like Latin "b" from "p", "d" from "t", "v" from "f", etc), or "front" from "middle" from "back" articulation (like Mandarin pinyin "z" from "zh" from "j", or "c" from "ch" from "q", etc.), or "lax", "aspirated",and "fortis" (like in Korean "p" from "ph" from "pp" etc.).
And that is often the case for shorthand systems, that are usually phonetic but designed from scratch so that they are faster to write than any Latin-based script. They often use similar "logical" assignments of shapes to sounds to make the system easier to learn.
Voynichese was obviously designed from scratch, with no connection to previous alphabets; and may well have been more of a shorthand than an accurate phonetic alphabet. So it is not surprising that glyphs with similar shapes have similar context statistics.
All the best, --stolfi