One funny word on f114r.30

[Vuk88]

What do you mean by 1-to-1 compression? Treating each of my "elements" as a single character?

 
@Jorge_Stolfi, 

Regarding the 1-to-1 compression, yes, I meant exactly treating each of your "elements" as a single character. Practically speaking, before passing the text to any entropy scripts, I applied a Python mapping to assign a unique ASCII character to each complex element, so the algorithm wouldn't split up your "core elements". This is the exact snippet of the compression function I used:
 

Code:

def compress_to_atomic(w):     w = w.replace('cth', 'T')     w = w.replace('cph', 'P')     w = w.replace('ckh', 'K')     w = w.replace('cfh', 'F')     w = w.replace('ch', 'C')     w = w.replace('sh', 'S')     w = w.replace('iiin', 'W')     w = w.replace('iin', 'M')     w = w.replace('ee', 'E')     return w

 

Perhaps, but in the agglutinative languages I know about the morphemes are often whole syllables, so the words end up being (1) rather long... This is very much like the structure of syllables in some languages like Cantonese or Vietnamese.

 
Regarding your observation about agglutinative languages, I believe you are right about the analogy with Cantonese and Vietnamese. After reading your post, I went online to read up on the syllable structure of those languages and I realized my conceptual mistake. Polysynthetic languages have huge words, while VMS "words" are notoriously very short.
 
When my algorithm calculated an internal breakdown index of ~2.86 for each word in Voynichese, I mistakenly used the term "polysynthetic". Actually, in light of your point, the algorithm was just mathematically detecting the presence of roughly 3 rigid "slots" inside a short word. This fits perfectly with your slot model and with the structure of Isolating / Monosyllabic languages.
 
If I understood correctly... from what I read, a language like Vietnamese builds its short words using strict and unchangeable slots in this way: [Initial Consonant] + [Vowel Nucleus] + [Tone Tag]. If we apply this to the VMS, maybe your final characters like "e" or "y" are simply filling that specific final 'Tone Tag' or 'Grammatical Particle' slot of the syllable. Is this the kind of architecture you have in mind?
 

I suppose that this propensity to duplication follows from those languages being monosyllabic and non-inflecting. Thus their use of duplication may be more appropriately compared to the occurrence of duplicate syllables in European words ("abitata", "papa", "cocomero"...)

 
If we view Voynich "words" as single syllables with fixed slots, then the math I pulled on word doubling makes a lot more sense. My script that measured the 2.2x doubling rate on the VMS doesn't calculate the repetition of internal syllables (like in the Italian word 'pa-pa' or 'cu-cu-lo'), but calculates the repetition of entire text tokens separated by spaces. If the VMS were a European inflectional language, the doubling of consecutive space-separated tokens would be drastically suppressed by statistical models. Instead, it behaves statistically almost identical to an Isolating/Austronesian language (like Indonesian) that uses full-word morphological reduplication to simulate grammar.
 
If we accept your intriguing hypothesis that the VMS has the slot structure of an Asian/Isolating language, do you think it's possible that the final combination "de" (even though it's statistically very rare, just like some specific Asian grammatical particles are) could be explained on a morphological level, without having to assume it's a distracted error?

Alfredo