Deconstructing the VMS : A positionless ledger (part 1)

[Dunsel]

Hmm, but actually, all this is already well known? it’s just presented slightly differently. The very limited selection of bigrams, the high level of structure. And of course, if you leave out the ‘gallows’, you end up sticking to the basic structures of the familiar families: the ‘e’ family, the ‘aiin’ families, the ‘air’ family, and the ‘or/ar’ and ‘ol/al’ bigrams. In that respect, I’m not quite sure what to make of it yet, or perhaps I’ve missed something (which is always quite possible ).

The difference is that I’m not starting from those families or defining them as units. I’m deriving a small conditional transition ledger from the text itself and then asking whether that same transition system can actually reconstruct the vocabulary. So far, it reproduces the tested core, hapax and gallows populations at 100% across all five scribes. The common families fall out of the ledger because they are heavily used transition paths, rather than being built into the model beforehand. And, I believe the reason we see these 'families' is that a copy/mutate production system would create them.  Copy a word. Copy the word again, change 1 letter.  daiin / dain / dair / etc.  You just created a family.

The other part I think is potentially new is the separation between a very small common transition system and a much larger rare-transition layer. Most ordinary words use the common transitions; rarer or more unusual forms draw on the additional transitions.

I agree that the underlying regularity of Voynichese is not new. What I’m trying to determine is whether those known regularities can be reduced to a concrete, falsifiable construction rule rather than just described as word families.  

So, The whole purpose of this ledger experiment/theory is to find the smallest, easiest and most accurate construction method possible, one that was 15th century scribe doable.