Atoms and elements of the Voynichese alphabet

[Jorge_Stolfi]

First, identifying errors in an undeciphered writing system assumes we know what the correct form should be.

That would be a necessary condition to prove that something is an error.  But, even without it, one can conclude that some quirk is more likely to be an error than an intentional feature.

For instance, there are many instances of e or o whose hole is filled in, turning them into big black dots.  Most people seem to consider the filling of those glyphs as meaningless accidents, and transcribe them as e or o.  But there is no proof of this.  Maybe those black dots are a distinct glyph type...

More generally, every single glyph instance in the VMS is different from all the others, so in theory the Voynichese alphabet could have more than 200'000 letters.  But we generally assume that all those glyph instances are handwritten realizations of only a couple dozen glyph types.  So, when we transcribe the text, we must decide first what are those ideal glyph types, by deciding whether the difference between two glyph instances is meaningless handwriting variation or due to them being distinct glyph types.  While some people my disagree, most seem to agree on the glyph types that are represented by distinct letters in the EVA encoding.  

But all this is mere conjecture, without proof.  Until we decipher the encoding, we will never know for sure whether we got it right.  That is unfortunately how we must operate if we want to do any research at all.

That is circular: build a grammar from the text, notice some forms don't fit cleanly, declare those forms errors, simplify the grammar, and present the simplified grammar as evidence that the errors were real.

Yes.  This reasoning  assumes that, since the Author created the script from scratch, rather than as an adaptation of an existing script, he probably made it nicely symmetrical.  Like the missionaries who created the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  Then the probability that some observed feature of the text is an error is boosted if treating it as such would make the system more symmetrical.

Second, every collapse replaces a rare form with a common one — removing elements with high entropy and replacing them with elements with low entropy. "ir" (607 instances) merged into "iin" (4,109 instances). "m" merged into "iin."

Yes.  But that is not a valid reason to deny the existence of errors.  Entropy does not mean meaningful information contents; it measures the noise as well as the message. Random spelling errors, non-systematic abbreviations, bogus and missing word spaces --- all these things generally increase the entropy of a text.  

If some X are errors for Y, mapping all X to Y will discard meaningful information as well as that particular form of noise.  But if the estimated fraction of X that are errors is high enough, the benefits of the second effect may compensate for the drawbacks of the former one.

Each collapse reduces the number of distinct word types and increases the frequency concentration. If the text is already at the lower boundary of what looks like language — Gheuens showed the functional alphabet reduces to about 13 characters — making it more repetitive by collapsing characters pushes it further from language, not closer.

Glyph types are not the same as phonemes.  Most written languages that use the Latin alphabet will encode some phonemes with combinations of two or more letters, or represent multiple phonemes by the same letter.  Consider "sh" in English, or the two phonemes "ò" and "ó" of Italian both written just "o".  

My current best guess for the Voynichese alphabet -- excluding what I believe are abbreviations (m), fancy variants (p, f), non-phonetic or "foreign-sound" symbols (q, v, x), mere handwriting variants or deformations (b, g, j, u), and what I suspect are tone or pitch codes (a, o, y) -- has the following letters and multigraphs: { d l r s } + { k t ke te } + { Ch Sh ee Che She eee } + { CTh CKh CThe CKhe } + { n in iin iiin }; that is, at least 4 + 4 + 6 + 4 + 4 = 22 distinct phonemes.

And that count does not include { a o y } or considers the possibility that these glyphs too may be letter modifiers, in addition to e.  

And that count does not consider also the possibility that some of the 22 "letters" above may be parts of additional digraphs in addition to having phonetic values of their own -- like Italian "g" and "n" occur by themselves with distinct sounds but also occur as the digraph "gn" which stands for a third distinct phoneme.  

And anyway written Voynichese may use the same glyph or digraph to represent two or more phonemes, like the two sounds of "th" in English.  Which is almost certain if the system was invented to be a shorthand system to record speech in real time, rather than a full alphabet for other kinds of writing.

Third, similar glyphs are a key feature of the VMS writing system, not evidence of errors.

Now it is my turn to note that this is just a hypothesis, not a proven fact....

The similarity between "ir" and "iin," between "ch" and "sh," between "k" and "t" is the design of the system.

Agreed for Ch/Sh and k/t, but not for ir and iin.  The correct comparison would be between r and n, which, like k and t, have one stroke in common and different choices for the other stroke.  But that is not the case for r and in.  Their similar occurrence patterns breaks the apparent asymmetry in the design of the glyphs.

Removing the similar forms doesn't correct errors — it dismantles the system that produces the text.

Quite on the contrary: considering final ir as a scribal error for iin removes what would be a big wart of that system.

By the way, my explanation for final ir also implies that some final r that are not preceded by i are likewise quillos for in; so that, for example, any dar may have been meant to be a dain.  But I am not yet willing to correct all final r to in, because my word model says that r (like its cousins d l s) can legitimately occur in word-final position, without a preceding i.

All the best, --stolfi