Deconstructing the VMS : A positionless ledger (part 1)

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Does the ledger predict material it was not built from? Yes. A ledger built from scribe 1 core material reproduces a high proportion of core text from Scribes 2–5. 

I didn't look at your "ledger" model in detail, but from what I read it seems that it is what mathematicians call a finite state automaton (FSA), whose language (in the mathematical sense, meaning the set of generated words) is the Voynichese lexicon.  Specifically, it is an acyclic automaton, meaning that it has no closed loops, and therefore it generates only a finite set of words. 

For any finite set of words there is an FSA that generates all those words and no others.  That automaton can be constructed by a procedure that seems to be similar to your ledger construction method.

In particular, any "slot grammar" or any other model that generates a finite set of words has an equivalent FSA that generates the same words.  The opposite may not be true; that is, there may be no slot grammar that generates the same words as a given FSA.  That is why slot grammars are always imperfect: they either generate only a subset of the VMS lexicon or generate many words that are not in the lexicon.  On the other hand, for that same reason a slot grammar is more informative: if the VMS lexicon can be closely approximated by a slot grammar (say, with only 5% of errors either way), that is a very significant fact about the language or encoding.

Did the scribes actually use something like this to construct words?

Even before I found the SPS=SBJ match, I had no respect for all the "gibberish" theories, for common sense reasons.  The fact that the lexicon is described by a slot grammar or some other mathematical model does not mean that the text was created using that model, and does not rule out a meaningful text.  Not even a natural language text in the plain.

All the best, --stolfi